President Biden’s coronavirus response team learned two things in its first week in office: Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine was very effective – but the company was millions of doses behind its production schedule.
Preliminary talks that began under the Trump administration over a vaccine-making partnership between the pharmaceutical giant and its rival, Merck, whose own vaccination attempt failed, were “incremental” and go nowhere, according to senior government officials. fast not. And Johnson and Johnson seemed reluctant to commit to a major deal with Merck, officials said.
“They just weren’t all in,” one of the officials told CNN.
That changed when Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus tsar, called Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky on a Sunday in early February and asked the company to meet with the moment and stress that the US in a “national emergency” and that it was time. to go “big and fat”.
“You can not be incremental and small in your thinking. We have to overcome this problem,” said one senior administration official, recounting the conversation, which lasted an hour longer than the scheduled 15 minutes.
Zients recalls Gorsky – a graduate of West Point and a U.S. military veteran – of Johnson & Johnson’s largest contributions during World War II, including the manufacture of first tape and other military supplies. Just as Americans remembered Johnson and Johnson’s contributions at the time, efforts to accelerate vaccination of Americans would be their new legacy, Zients said, according to two senior officials.
“It was really a turning point,” said one official, noting that Gorsky was “embracing” the approach and discussions on a large-scale partnership with Merck were rapidly becoming more serious.
The conversation and others between Biden administration officials and executives of both companies depends, was Biden’s authorization under the Defense Production Act to force the companies to cooperate if they did not want to. A senior administration official said authority was never explicitly threatened in talks with both companies, but added that it was implicitly a motivating factor.
“The DPA is always there, implicitly as a tool that brings people to the table and puts people on their toes,” the official said.
The administration would have been prepared to call in the DPA’s coercive authorities if the two companies had not reached an agreement but did not need it, the official said. Instead, Biden is forcing other authorities under the DPA to invest $ 105 million to help Merck adjust its manufacturing facilities to produce the vaccine on a large scale and to accelerate the supply of key production materials to Johnson & Johnson.
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