The Good Kind of Surge

happened in virus News today. Visor and bio ent Tech asked the US Food and Drug Administration for permission to store their vaccine at lower temperatures that would allow the drug to be stored for two weeks in the type of freezers pharmacies use. Making storage easier in this way could simplify distribution of the shock. The partners submitted new data showing the vaccine is stable when it is stored

at minus twenty five to minus fifteen degrees celsius. Current protocol is to store the vaccine for up to six months in an ultra cold freezer at temperatures up to negative sixty degrees celsius and to ship them in a special thermal container. This limits the number of facilities that have the equipment needed to store and administer the vaccine. The European Union plans to double its cash commitment for

the KOVACS program. According to an EU official familiar with the matter, the block will now contribute one billion euros to the program, which provides vaccines to poorer nations. G seven nations, including the US, the UK, and France, are also expected to pledge donations of vaccine supplies. Finally, in the US, there are early signs of a resurgence of COVID nineteen cases in the Great Plains, the area where

the most recent nationwide surge started. The seven day average of new cases in North Dakota has climbed by one hundred and forty seven percent in the past week, the most in the US. According to COVID Tracking Project data. Nebraska's cases are up to the period and South Dakotas are up seventeen. The move is a reminder that while the overall trends have improved vastly, the pandemic continues and

hotspots are likely to keep popping up. And now, for today's main story, the US vaccine supply is poised to double in the coming weeks and months, according to an analysis by Bloomberg, allowing a broad expansion of doses administered across the country. Currently, the US is administering one point six million doses a day, constrained by the recent supply of about ten million to fifteen million doses a week, but COVID nineteen vaccine manufacturers and US officials have accelerated

the production timelines. I spoke to Senior editor Drew Armstrong, who leads Bloomberg's Vaccine Tracker. Drew said the spigots are about open, providing hundreds of millions of doses, just as pharmacies and mass vaccination sites become more equipped to administer them. Let's start with some numbers. How many COVID nineteen vaccines is the US currently distributing, and more importantly, how is that number expected to change over the coming months. That's

a really good question. Um. So the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker, which is the product that I run here, we look at every day how many shots going to arms around the US. And what we see right now is that you know, about one point six one point seven million doses a day are administered in all fifty states and across some federal entities, um and some territories. And that's

a number that's been really constrained essentially by supply. The US distributes anywhere from ten million to fifteen million doses a week, and if you do the math on that, you know, with a couple of little variances, one point six you know, give or take a couple hundred thousand

is where you get. So we've been in this environment now for a few weeks where you know, just about every dose that gets sent out is more or less being you know, doses are being used at the same pace that they're that they're sent out, and that is not a pace that's been fast enough to cover the United States in any kind of timely fashion. We have a calculator on our website that shows, you know, at the current pace, how long would it take to cover

scent of Americans with a two does vaccine? And I think right now that number is up to about nine months. I don't think that makes anybody happy. That would be sometime in the fall um heading towards the beginning of winter. But you know, we do know that more vaccine is coming. So what is going to lead to this increased supply? So I think when you think about manufacturing in this case, what is a new and complicated product. You know, these

vaccines they're actually quite high technology. They're very challenging. To spin up large scale manufacturing. You need to think about a manufacturing ramp, which is what we you know, what everybody calls this where basically supply tends to start out at a trickle. More factories get broad online essentially, or the manufacturing lines in those factories they add new ones, or they make them more efficient. You look for processes and you begin to see re increases in production closer

to what a maximum is. We took a very careful look at all of the public statements by the companies, you know, they have made commitments to saying we will deliver you know, X number of doses under our existing contract by this month, another hundred million doses of doses delivered by the following month, and combine all of those things together with some additional more granular timetables to show that there's actually gonna be quite a bit of vaccine

supply coming in the next few months. Taken together, you know, the Fiser vaccine moderna vaccine that's likely to be authorized for use by J and J. We go from a place where we're at around you know, fifteen million doses a week now too. By the time we get to March, you know, we're really looking at more like twenty million doses a week by the time we get to April, may million a week, by the time we're in June, thirty million a week. That starts to really really add up.

You're talking about, you know, by April, enough vaccine to cover a hundred and nine million Americans. By Junior, get to fifty million by July, we have more vaccine, you know, doses than we have people to give them to. Although those projections require companies to hit their targets, so it's a major caveat now to meet these deadlines, they need to actually succeed in making the stuff. But we're basing this on the numbers that they are promising, and certainly

hoping that they get those right. Obviously, these numbers sound fantastic, and and the question of if they're feasible targets is a big one. I mean, we've already seen delays and production delays and shipping um obviously even right now going on with the weather, we've seen problems in getting vaccines out of communities. So I mean, even in your opinion, how how overly optimistic are these targets. Well, I don't

know if I would call them overly optimistic. I mean, I think one of the things that's worth remembering about these companies is that these are very large corporations that, in my experience dealing with them, tend to be quite conservative in what they promised. That said, a lot of the promises that you know they are making recently, I think can get conflated with some of the promises of the prior administration, where there was kind of a lot

of overpromise and under deliver on vaccine numbers, um. You know, but these companies are actually you know, they don't say this stuff unless they think that they can do it, because they know that if they don't that is a big disappointment and that they will be held to account, hauled up before Congress, you know, made villains in the eyes of the American public, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. They tend

to be pretty conservative about how they talk about this stuff. So, you know, I think that they would not be saying this if they did not have a strong degree of confidence that they will meet these targets. Now, I want to pause real quickly here and saying there's a lot of other stuff that can go wrong. Look at this, a storm that has more or less put vaccinations in

Texas on hold. If you dig into our vaccine tracker, you can actually take a look and see that Texas took a huge hit on the terms of the number of vaccines that it's been able to administer over the last several days. You know, I mean things can go wrong, whether UM shipping issues. We may get to a point where you know, we've never we haven't distributed this vaccine

as much anymore. There could be distribution bottlenecks. We don't know if there might be some you know, long term side effect that we're not aware of that causes one of these vaccines to either be pulled from the market or limited in use. There's a lot of variables here. This is not just manufacturing UM. You know, and I've been taught in this pandemic that you know, if stuff can't go wrong, it will go wrong. So you know, I really want to caution people. This is a model

of what companies are saying. There are many other moving pieces in this big vaccine machine that have to all keep moving and not breaking down and or or for this to work. And you raise a really important point that supply, just the quantity of vaccines is maybe not even half the battle, but only a piece of this

very complicated puzzle. So assuming that we will have this increased supply of vaccines going into the spring and even into the summer, I mean what has been announced as far as plans on local, state, federal government lines to make sure this increased supply will get distributed and into arms. Yeah.

One of the really interesting things that has been happening and actually gave us a little bit more confidence in writing this story, was not just looking at in isolation the statements by the companies, but you know what is actually happening on the ground in order to kind of widen the you know, the pipeline, you know, for the last mile of getting these things from factory to arm, etcetera.

I think if you look around the country, there is a building of vaccine and indistration capacity that's been going on. Michigan's top health officials said earlier this month that we could be doing eighty thousand doses a day. We're only getting, you know, but if you look at what they're actually getting, the number of doses they're getting to be able to administer it's you know, anywhere from thirty thousand to fifty thousand doses a day less than that. FEMA has been

opening up mass vaccination centers around the country. They have a pop upsite in Delaware that's going to go for six days and do three thousand people a day. Football stadiums are being turned into mass vaccination centers. Um. You know in San Francisco, the forty nine or stadium, they say they can do fifteen thousand doses a day there. Um. This is happening all around the country where there is

this building of administration capacity. You know, they've pulled retired nurses and doctors back into service and said, hey, come help out with this. Pharmacies are now beginning to be shipped vaccine for use by the general public. Those are

tens of thousands of locations. I think one of the things that have to remember, you know, a good comparison to this is like the Nursing Home program, where the big drug store chains were contracted with to go out and vaccinate people in the nursing homes and actually went really really slowly. I think people thought that, oh, this will be great, We'll hire these big companies that have

locations everywhere. They'll sweep across America and vaccinate all the old people in the nursing homes who are the folks who are most vulnerable to this disease and really need these vaccines. That's not what happened. It turns out it is way easier and more efficient to tell ten thousand people to, you know, or fifteen thousand people, Hey, drive to the football stadium that every Sunday in the fall is used to handling a hundred thousand people getting in

and out of this place. Line you all up and vaccinate you. That's easy to do, that's efficient to do. What's really hard to do is to say, Okay, you're gonna have to go drive out to tiny, little essentially you know, nursing homes all around the country and go door to door vaccinating fragile ninety year old who have to be handled with extreme care and caution because of their susceptibility to the ZA. We are moving into a place where the efficiency on the administration side really begins

to ramp up. From the federal government perspective. You know what has the ad Biden administration said as far as their goals for having America vaccinated. I mean, have they taken into account this new supply line of vaccines and adjusted their timetable at all. One of the things it's a very interesting contrast between this current administration and the prior administration is that they seem to be quite conscious about being conservative and not overpromising how they're going to

deliver these vaccines. And you see comments that kind of look like trying to talk both ways about this, where on one hand they say, things are going great, We're hitting all our targets. Look how wonderful we're doing, and really trying to you know, count their own winds on this, you know, on the other hand, they say, whoa wa, whoa, be careful, all we won't have all these vaccines until July,

which is a month later than what we project. You know, we see them talking down production of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine a little bit, saying, well, we expect that to be a very very slow ramp. I think there's a little bit of you know, both political and public

health expectations setting um going on here. If I had to take a guess where, you know, one, you don't want people to think, you know, yeah, you know, I'll have a vaccine next week, so I can go and give up all the good public health measures that I've been practicing for a year now. Um, you know. You also, at the same time, I don't want to give people the mindset they're like, hey, the vaccine is never getting here,

so why even bother I'm going to give up. For that reason, I think they're trying to walk a little bit of a fine line from a public health standpoint while also trying to control the narrative from a political standpoint. You know, we'll see if they adjust those projections, and and obviously we intend to you know, keep on the companies that are manufacturing these and hold them to account, um and call out if they don't hit their missed targets um. You know, and we'll be keeping an eye

on the Biden administration as well. That was Drew Armstrong and that's it for our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one twenty bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by Tophur foreheads Magnus Henrickson and me Laura Carlson.

Today's main story was reported by Drew Armstrong. Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesco Levi. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.