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The feds have ordered 300 million doses of a potential coronavirus vaccine from British drugmaker AstraZeneca, officials said Thursday. The company will get up to $1.2 billion from the US Department of Health and Human Services to speed the development and production of the vaccine with the goal of delivering the first doses as early …
The feds have ordered 300 million doses of a potential coronavirus vaccine from British drugmaker AstraZeneca, officials said Thursday.
The company will get up to $1.2 billion from the US Department of Health and Human Services to speed the development and production of the vaccine with the goal of delivering the first doses as early as October, according to officials.
The deal between AstraZeneca and HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority includes clinical studies that will start this summer with about 30,000 US volunteers, officials said.
But AstraZeneca acknowledged that the vaccine may not work as it’s still being studied. The Food and Drug Administration must sign off on it before it’s made available, the feds said.
The Food and Drug Administration must sign off on the vaccine before it’s made available, the feds said.
The contract is part of the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” initiative to make a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine widely available by January. A vaccine is considered key to ending the coronavirus crisis that has killed more than 90,000 Americans and devastated the US economy.
“The Trump administration is making multiple major investments in developing and manufacturing promising vaccines long before they’re approved so that a successful vaccine will reach the American people without a day wasted,” HHS Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement.
AstraZeneca is licensing its vaccine candidate known as AZD1222 from the University of Oxford, where it was developed. The company said it will soon have data from a clinical trial involving more than 1,000 healthy volunteers in England, which could lead to late-stage trials if the results are positive.
AstraZeneca said it has the capacity to produce 1 billion doses of the vaccine and has already made deals to supply at least 400 million doses. The company said it expects to start supplying the UK in September.
“We will do everything in our power to make this vaccine quickly and widely available,” AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said in a statement.
AstraZeneca’s New York-listed shares were up 2.8 percent in premarket trading at $55.35 as of 7:48 a.m.
Other companies are also racing to produce a vaccine for the deadly virus. Johnson & Johnson has said it expects to start testing its leading candidate in humans in September, and biotech firm Moderna, which trumpeted promising results from an early trial this week.
