Later today the House Energy and Commerce Committee will conduct a hearing on vaccination progress. Following are excerpts from prepared testimony. You can watch/listen to the actual hearing starting at 10:30 Eastern.
According to John Young with Pfizer, “We expect to increase the number of doses we make available for shipment from approximately 4 to 5 million doses per week at the beginning of February to more than 13 million doses per week by the middle of March. We are on track to make 120 million doses available for shipment by the end of March and an additional 80 million doses by the end of May. And, we anticipate all 300 million contracted doses will be made available for shipment by the end of July, enabling the vaccination of up to 150 million Americans.”
According to Stephen Hoge with Moderna, “We are on track to meet our commitment to deliver 100 million doses by the end of March. We have doubled our monthly deliveries since late 2020, and we are aiming to double them again by April to more than 40 million doses per month. Based on this progress scaling up manufacturing, we recently agreed to move up our delivery timeline: we now are aiming to deliver a second hundred million doses by the end of May and a third hundred million doses by the end of July.” (There is a nice overview of the actually production flow on page 6 of Hoge’s prepared testimony.)
According to Richard Nettles with Johnson & Johnson, “Assuming necessary regulatory approvals relating to our manufacturing processes, our plan is to begin shipping immediately upon emergency use authorization, and deliver enough single-doses by the end of March to enable the vaccination of more than 20 million Americans. We are confident in our plans to deliver 100 million single-dose vaccines to the United States during the first half of 2021…”
Representatives of AstraZeneca and Novavax are also scheduled to testify.
Late Spring and early summer continue to be our best bets for matching supply velocity with existing demand velocity. Then we are likely to become increasingly concerned by the thirty-to-forty percent of vaccine “consumers” who are reluctant to consume. It is worth not waiting to work on that predictable problem.
UPDATE: Bloomberg provides a summary of the Tuesday hearing.