US expects 100 million people vaccinated by February

I work in the pharmaceutical industry and have supported the launch and scale up of multiple franchise drugs. I'm very skeptical of this projection. I don't know where you get your confidence because nobody at Moderna or Pfizer have claimed that 200m doses was feasible in this timeline.

Just a few weeks ago a Lonza chairman said that they can produce 500 million doses per year if additional equipment is installed [1]. So that's 20 million vaccines per month at a capacity which is not yet installed. So even if the US secured 100% of supply, and even if that equipment were magically built, installed, and validated over night, they would be able to produce 60 million vaccines by February. They are actually far behind that volume at the moment. Pfizer plans to produce 50 million doses in 2020 and depending on how quickly they scale up could produce an additional 200 million doses by February [2] So that's 125 million additional vaccinations.

So the most optimistic projection at the moment is that there will be 185 million vaccinations worldwide by February which is contingent on magical materialization of capacity which currently does not exist. Then, for the US to get to 100 million vaccines, they would need to secure more than 50% of global inventory, which is perhaps the only realistic advantage that could make this possible.

/r/Coronavirus Thread Parent Link - medicalxpress.com