This uncertainty partly prompted companies such as Pfizer and Moderna to expand production more elsewhere to meet global demand. DPA rules left unclear when US plants manufacturing those same vaccines would be permitted to export doses globally. The use of the DPA in this way to implement Operation Warp Speed, however, had unintended consequences. The primary aim was to obtain enough doses as fast as possible to vaccinate the US population. Īmericans got doses early because the DPA "priority-rated" contracts agreed to in 2020 allowed the US government to take on some of the financial risk to encourage vaccine companies to invest in costly production facilities without knowing whether the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would authorize their vaccines for use. But new research suggests that how the US government used the DPA to contract with vaccine manufacturers and some input providers to implement Operation Warp Speed may have been partly to blame. The reason why US production lagged after a strong start remains a mystery. Scarcities were especially acute for the highly effective, but technologically complex, messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) versions that Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna were manufacturing in very few places and thus would reach most of the world only through international trade. The missing US supplies aggravated shortages in a world still desperate for vaccines. Production in the European Union surpassed the United States, as even Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna-the two biggest vaccines being made in the United States-expanded operations more in Europe. The initiative-often by relying on the Defense Production Act (DPA) of 1950-accelerated the research, development through clinical trials, and early manufacturing of a diverse array of potential candidate vaccines.īut by early summer 2021, US production of COVID-19 vaccine doses mostly stopped growing. This impressive feat was largely achieved by Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership involving the Department of Defense and Department of Health and Human Services. The United States made hundreds of millions of doses of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines available by early 2021, a little more than a year after the pandemic began.
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