Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer hopes to get Covid-19 vaccines to the masses faster by reducing manufacturing time by almost half, the company confirmed on Monday.
By increasing production and being more efficient, the company expects to reduce the time it takes to produce a batch of vaccine from 110 days to about 60 days.
“Just last month, we doubled production,” Chaz Calitri, who runs the company’s headquarters in Kalamazoo, Michigan, told USA Today.
In December, Pfizer became the first pharmaceutical manufacturer to receive an emergency authorization for the coronavirus vaccine from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And about a week later, the vaccines started sending out.
Unlike other vaccine developers, Pfizer has not taken any federal funds for research or development from the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed.
The deployment of vaccines quickly developed bottlenecks and soon there were complaints from state governors that they were not getting enough doses from the Trump administration.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis even suggested that Pfizer experience production problems, which the company’s CEO Albert Bourla quickly denied.
As of Monday, 59.3 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine had been delivered in the United States and 42.4 million doses had been administered, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
