Pfizer will only deliver half the vaccines it expected to this year

Pfizer Inc. will only be able to deliver half the COVID-19 vaccine doses it promised to ship by the end of the year, the company said Thursday.

Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech SE projected it would distribute 100 million vaccines worldwide in 2020, but has cut that to 50 million. "Scaling up the raw material supply chain took longer than expected," a spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal, and the vaccine's clinical trial finished "somewhat later than the initial projection" as well. A person directly involved in the vaccine's development meanwhile said "some early batch of raw material failed to meet the standards," leading Pfizer to miss this year's projections.

The U.K. on Wednesday granted an emergency-use authorization for Pfizer's two-shot vaccine, making it the first Western country to do so. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reviewing Pfizer's vaccine for a similar authorization after it proved safe and effective at stopping the transmission of COVID-19.

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