Global Covid Vaccine Manufacturing, Supply, and Distribution

[Ernie]

The last few weeks I've been taking an interest in the global Covid vaccine manufacturing, supply, and distribution.

I've been holding out for Novavax (if it proves to be as good as touted). The initial formulation doesn't seem to be very effective against variants so I hope they change their formulation in the next couple months.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/2 ... ine-484731

It looks like the USA has administered about 30% of the worlds vaccine supply so far while Africa has only received 2%. I feel sorry for people who cannot buy their way into the world supply.

[steve-in-kville]

Why would I get a vaccine for something that doesn't exist?

(someone had to say it )

[Ken]

These vaccines are incredibly complex products that require state-of-the-art manufacturing processes. You can't just hand the recipe to some pharma plant in say Nigeria and start manufacturing vaccine, even if the recipes were released into the public domain. That said, we are probably weeks away from reaching the point that US vaccine production far exceeds US demand and the rest of the world will start getting the bulk of American vaccine production. Here is the Wikipedia description of the process for Pfizer. This is not something you can probably replicate outside the US, Europe, and maybe China and Japan.

Pfizer and BioNTech are manufacturing the vaccine in their own facilities in the United States and in Europe. The license to distribute and manufacture in China was purchased by Fosun, alongside its investment in BioNTech.

Manufacturing the vaccine requires a three-stage process. The first stage involves the molecular cloning of DNA plasmids that code for the spike protein by infusing them into Escherichia coli bacteria. For all markets, this stage is conducted in the United States, at a small Pfizer pilot plant in Chesterfield, Missouri (near St. Louis). After four days of growth, the bacteria are killed and broken open, and the contents of their cells are purified over a week and a half to recover the desired DNA product. The DNA is stored in tiny bottles and frozen for shipment. Safely and quickly transporting the DNA at this stage is so important that Pfizer has used its company jet and helicopter to assist.

The second stage is being conducted at a Pfizer plant in Andover, Massachusetts,in the United States, and at BioNTech's plants in Germany. The DNA is used as a template to build the desired mRNA strands, which takes about four days. Once the mRNA has been created and purified, it is frozen in plastic bags about the size of a large shopping bag, of which each can hold up to 10 million doses. The bags are placed on special racks on trucks which take them to the next plant.

The third stage is being conducted at Pfizer plants in Portage, Michigan (near Kalamazoo) in the United States, and Puurs in Belgium. This stage involves combining the mRNA with lipid nanoparticles, then filling vials, boxing vials, and freezing them. Croda International subsidiary Avanti Polar Lipids is providing the requisite lipids. As of November 2020, the major bottleneck in the manufacturing process was combining mRNA with lipid nanoparticles. At this stage, it takes only four days to go from mRNA and lipids to finished vials, but each lot must then spend several weeks in deep-freeze storage while undergoing verification against 40 quality-control measures.

The Pfizer plant in Puurs is responsible for all vials for destinations outside the United States. Therefore, all doses administered in the Americas outside of the United States have required at least two transatlantic flights (one to take DNA to Europe and one to bring back finished vaccine vials).

In February 2021, Pfizer revealed that the entire sequence initially took about 110 days on average from start to finish, and that the company was making progress on reducing the time to 60 days. More than half the days in the production process are dedicated to rigorous testing and quality assurance at each of the three stages. Pfizer also revealed that the process requires 280 components and relies upon 25 suppliers located in 19 different countries.

Vaccine manufacturers normally take several years to optimize the process of making a particular vaccine for speed and cost-effectiveness before attempting large-scale production. Due to the urgency presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, Pfizer and BioNTech began production immediately with the process by which the vaccine had been originally formulated in the laboratory, then started to identify ways to safely speed up and scale up that process.

BioNTech announced in September 2020, that it had signed an agreement to acquire a manufacturing facility in Marburg, Germany from Novartis to expand their vaccine production capacity. Once fully operational, the facility would produce up to 750 million doses per year, or more than 60 million doses per month. The site will be the third BioNTech facility in Europe which produces the vaccine, while Pfizer operates at least four production sites in the United States and Europe.

The Marburg facility had previously specialized in cancer immunotherapy for Novartis. By the end of March 2021, BioNTech had finished retrofitting the facility for mRNA vaccine production and retraining its 300 staff, and obtained approval to begin manufacturing. Besides making mRNA, the Marburg facility also performs the step of combining mRNA with lipids to form lipid nanoparticles, then ships the vaccine in bulk to other facilities for fill and finish (i.e., filling and boxing vials).

On 23 April 2021 the EMA authorised an increase in batch size and associated process scale up at Pfizer's vaccine manufacturing site in Puurs, Belgium. This increase is expected to have a significant impact on the supply of the vaccine in the European Union.

Here is a more descriptive narrative of the process with photos of the equipment and plants involved: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/ ... 371693001/

[Josh]

The last few weeks I've been taking an interest in the global Covid vaccine manufacturing, supply, and distribution.

I've been holding out for Novavax (if it proves to be as good as touted). The initial formulation doesn't seem to be very effective against variants so I hope they change their formulation in the next couple months.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/2 ... ine-484731

It looks like the USA has administered about 30% of the worlds vaccine supply so far while Africa has only received 2%. I feel sorry for people who cannot buy their way into the world supply.

Well, we could voluntarily choose not to get the vaccine so more are available to people in need.

[Ken]

The last few weeks I've been taking an interest in the global Covid vaccine manufacturing, supply, and distribution.

I've been holding out for Novavax (if it proves to be as good as touted). The initial formulation doesn't seem to be very effective against variants so I hope they change their formulation in the next couple months.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/2 ... ine-484731

It looks like the USA has administered about 30% of the worlds vaccine supply so far while Africa has only received 2%. I feel sorry for people who cannot buy their way into the world supply.

Well, we could voluntarily choose not to get the vaccine so more are available to people in need.

Aren't you already doing that?

[Josh]

The last few weeks I've been taking an interest in the global Covid vaccine manufacturing, supply, and distribution.

I've been holding out for Novavax (if it proves to be as good as touted). The initial formulation doesn't seem to be very effective against variants so I hope they change their formulation in the next couple months.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/2 ... ine-484731

It looks like the USA has administered about 30% of the worlds vaccine supply so far while Africa has only received 2%. I feel sorry for people who cannot buy their way into the world supply.

Well, we could voluntarily choose not to get the vaccine so more are available to people in need.

Aren't you already doing that?

No, I’m declining because I won’t inject a ground up aborted baby into my veins.

[justme]

No, I’m declining because I won’t inject a ground up aborted baby into my veins.

vaccines are IM, not IV.
i understand the shock value that you're trying to say is ground up aborted baby, but to get the full effect, you really should make sure your entire statement is accurate.

[Ken]

Well, we could voluntarily choose not to get the vaccine so more are available to people in need.

Aren't you already doing that?

No, I’m declining because I won’t inject a ground up aborted baby into my veins.

I wouldn't do that either. Because that would provide no immunity effects of any kind. But I am confident there were no ground up babies in the Pfizer vaccine that I did get.

[Soloist]

I wouldn't do that either. Because that would provide no immunity effects of any kind. But I am confident there were no ground up babies in the Pfizer vaccine that I did get.

I actually would completely agree. I'm opposed to the testing that Pfizer did on HEK-293, otherwise I would have been in the trials for it.
The problem is that often you don't even know what vaccine you are getting when you go for your appointment and it has been changed before after you get there.

The data shown for how Pfizer is made is fairly accurate and basically the same way for Moderna. What Moderna is concealing is where the DNA they are using is coming from and its from a fetal cell line. Pfizer on the other hand is using an adult cell line for the DNA.

At this point, I am extremely skeptical there will be an ethical option available in the USA. Fauci had basically said we don't need AstraZeneca and the few ethical options being developed are out of the USA. Consistently the government has rejected importing ethical vaccines despite the requests and the increased willingness of use by some "anti vaccine" camps.

[Bootstrap]

No, I’m declining because I won’t inject a ground up aborted baby into my veins.

vaccines are IM, not IV.
i understand the shock value that you're trying to say is ground up aborted baby, but to get the full effect, you really should make sure your entire statement is accurate.

And if I understand correctly, no cells derived from aborted babies are present in either the Moderna or the Pfizer vaccine. Did I get that wrong? So it's not in the veins and there's no ground up baby and nothing that came from a ground up baby.