The Trump administration will pay Pfizer nearly $2 billion for a December delivery of 100 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine the pharmaceutical company is developing, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced Wednesday.
The U.S. could buy another 500 million doses under the agreement _ if the vaccine ultimately proves safe and effective.
Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE announced separately that the agreement is with HHS and the Defense Department for a vaccine candidate the companies are developing jointly. It is the latest in a series of similar agreements with other vaccine companies.
"The data that we have so far illustrate a really robust host immune response ," said Pfizer's senior vice president, John Burkhardt, speaking about very early-stage findings.
The agreement is part of President Donald Trump's Operation Warp Speed vaccine program, under which multiple COVID-19 vaccines are being developed simultaneously. The program aims to deliver 300 million doses of a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine by January 2021.
Under the initiative, the government will speed development and buy vaccines — before final testing is complete _ so that the shots can be in hand and quickly distributed if the FDA approves or authoriizes their emergency use.
Americans would receive the vaccine for free, the companies said.
Pfizer is finishing an earlier stage of testing to determine which of four possible candidates to try in a larger, final study.
"A best case scenario would be a review of the package, it's found to be acceptable approval before the end of the year," Burkhardt said.
Other countries are also scrambling to get a vaccine for COVID-19, which has killed more than 617,000 people, according to a tally kept by Johns Hopkins University.
Nearly 4 million Americans have been infected by the new coronavirus and at least 142,000 have died from COVID-19, the disease it causes, according to Johns Hopkins.
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