Albert Bourla: We’ve much more Pfizer vaccine than they can use

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has said that there is much more of the coronavirus Pfizer vaccine than the United States and other countries can use right now.

Bourla, who is also Pfizer’s chairman, was being interviewed on CNBC‘s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday.

According to the interview’s unofficial transcript that US and Global News received from NBC Universal, the owners of CNBC, the Pfizer CEO said, “I don’t think that we have an issue of offering less vaccines in the country, or the countries frankly need. We have much more than they can use right now.”

CNBC senior health and science reporter Meg Tirrell, one of the interviewers, had asked Bourla how the manufacturing of the Pfizer vaccine was going and how confident was he to keep up a steady pace in order to meet the rising demand.

“When it comes to our ability to manufacture, yesterday, our partner already announced what I’m going to announce also myself today that we can now feel very confident that we will increase their mitochondrial production for this year, up to 2 billion doses,” said Bourla.

When asked how much he had already made that he had sitting there ready to go, the Pfizer chairman replied that at the end of 2020, “we had already manufactured more than 70 million doses and we had released from there, because there’s a quality control that you need to release – around 50 million doses.”

He added, “Then we manufactured more the first week of January. Right now I think we’ve released 33 million doses. And we have, let’s say, half of what we have manufactured sitting on the shelves.”

Mentioning that 2 billion doses this year is up from the previously expected 1.3 billion doses, Tirrell asked, “We understand some of that is because this fortuitous finding that there’s an extra dose in those five dose files, that accounts for 20% of that. But it also means that your manufacturing seems to be going better than you expected. So should we be expecting an increased pace, really, of output from you on a steady drumbeat throughout the year?”

Bourla replied that he was “very confident that this will happen much higher than” previously forecast, “to the tune of going from 1.3 to 2 billion doses.”

Answering the question, the CEO further said, “The 20% increase because they have 6 doses in the vial, was a result of data but also that we generated and we submitted to all regulatory authorities. And right now, the 6 doses have been approved by FDA, the European authorities the WHO, Israeli authorities, Switzerland authorities, you name it.”

He concluded the answer by saying, “So basically the entire world is using our 6 doses. But also, we have done tremendous steps to improve production of lipids by our third party manufacturers, our reduction of the drug substance in our manufacturing sites. We did a lot of things. Actually, I have to say that what our manufacturing team did was almost another miracle following what our research team did to bring this vaccine in such record time. They are scaling up manufacturing in speeds that we didn’t think that were possible. So they are also making the impossible possible.”

Watch the full interview on CNBC.com here.

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