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.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
'Stormy Monday for Don'Today's Newspapers A roundup of the headlines from the US front pages
-
6 queer poets to read whenever but especially nowThe Week Recommends April is National Poetry Month
-
How women's pain is often ignored in health carethe explainer The gap in care is especially glaring compared to how men are treated
-
Texas dairy worker gets bird flu from infected cowSpeed Read The virus has been spreading among cattle in Texas, Kansas, Michigan and New Mexico
-
Dengue hits the Americas hard and earlySpeed Read Puerto Rico has declared an epidemic as dengue cases surge
-
US bans final type of asbestosSpeed Read Exposure to asbestos causes about 40,000 deaths in the U.S. each year
-
Seattle Children's Hospital sues Texas over 'sham' demand for transgender medical recordsSpeed Read Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton subpoenaed records of any Texan who received gender-affirming care at the Washington hospital
-
Afghanistan has a growing female suicide problemSpeed Read The Taliban has steadily whittled away women's and girls' rights in Afghanistan over the past 2 years, prompting a surge in depression and suicide
-
US life expectancy rose in 2022 but not to pre-pandemic levelsSpeed Read Life expectancy is slowly crawling back up
-
Vallance diaries: Boris Johnson 'bamboozled' by Covid scienceSpeed Read Then PM struggled to get his head around key terms and stats, chief scientific advisor claims
-
An increasing number of dog owners are 'vaccine hesitant' about rabiesSpeed Read A new survey points to canine vaccine hesitancy
