Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Susan Walsh/POOL/AFP via Getty ImagesThe U.S. may have a robust enough supply of Covid-19 vaccine doses that it won’t need to use the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“My general feeling is that given the contractual relationships that we have with a number of companies, that we have enough vaccine to fulfill all of our needs without invoking AstraZeneca, ” Fauci, who runs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and is chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, told Reuters in an interview published late Thursday.
AstraZeneca’s (ticker: AZN) Covid-19 vaccine is not yet authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, though it has been widely administered in other nations for months. A Phase 3 trial of the vaccine run in the U.S. found that it was 76% effective against symptomatic Covid-19, though the company bungled the announcement of the data, first saying days earlier that the efficacy of the vaccine was 79%.
Fauci himself led the pushback on the initial data, issuing a late-night press release at NIAID last week saying that the data and safety monitoring board that had overseen the trial had “expressed concern” that the company had published “outdated information.”
Fauci then criticized the company on Good Morning America the following day, saying: “It really is unfortunate that this happened, this is really what you call an unforced error.”
The U.S. government has placed orders for 300 million vaccine doses from Moderna (ticker: MRNA), 300 million from Pfizer (PFE) and BioNTech (BNTX), and 100 million doses from Johnson & Johnso n (JNJ) vaccine, all expected by the end of July. That is enough to vaccinate 400 million people, more than the entire U.S. population.
The Biden administration has also said that it plans to buy 100 million more Johnson & Johnson doses, over and above the 100 million already contracted.
Meanwhile, the government last month announced plans to ship a stockpile of four million AstraZeneca doses to Mexico and Canada. Both countries have already authorized the vaccine.
Fauci’s comments came shortly before U.K. health authorities said that they had seen 25 cases of a rare blood-clotting condition that health authorities in other European nations have raised concerns could be linked to AstraZeneca’s vaccine.
A number of European countries, including Germany, France, and Sweden, plus Canada, have limited the AstraZeneca vaccine’s use in younger people while investigating the reports. Canada has stopped giving the AstraZeneca vaccine to people under 55, while Germany has stopped giving it to people under 60.
The European Medicines Agency is reviewing the cases, but says that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks.
In a March 14 statement, AstraZeneca said that the number of cases of blood clots in the 17 million people vaccinated in the U.K. and European Union at that time was lower than would have been expected in the general population. “The nature of the pandemic has led to increased attention in individual cases and we are going beyond the standard practices for safety monitoring of licensed medicines in reporting vaccine events, to ensure public safety,” the company’s chief medical officer, Ann Taylor, said in a statement at the time.
Shares of AstraZeneca’s American depositary receipt were flat in premarket trading on Friday, and fell 0.4% on Thursday. The stock is down 0.9% so far this year, and up 13.2% over the past 12 months.
Write to editors@barrons.com
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