The chief executive of Germany’s BioNTech SE said the biggest challenge facing it and partner Pfizer Inc now that their coronavirus vaccine is authorized for use in the United States will be to scale up manufacturing to meet huge demand.
“THE BASELINE PLAN IS 1.3 BILLION DOSES”
“We need to solve the manufacturing challenge,” Ugur Sahin told Reuters in an interview. “It is very clear that more doses are needed. And we are dealing with that question – how to produce more doses.”
Sahin said he expects the companies will receive conditional approval from the European Medicines Agency by the end of the month and can begin rolling out vaccine in European countries early next year.
“The baseline plan is 1.3 billion doses,” Sahin said. “And we are working on an extended plan. I can’t tell you at the moment what is possible and how much we can expand the scale but we will try to do it significantly.”
In data released this week, Pfizer and BioNTech said their vaccine began conferring some protection to recipients even before they received the second shot. It seemed to begin to show some efficacy around 12 days after the first shot.
Sahin said he was surprised by the data: “We know that the immune response is heavily boosted after the second dose.” He said the companies have not decided yet whether to evaluate a single-dose version of the vaccine. “This will be a discussion that we will certainly have with our partners Pfizer,” he said.