the staff of the Ridgewood blog
The US government has finalized an agreement with Pfizer and BioNTech to acquire 100 million doses of their candidate SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, worth US$1.95 billion. Additionally, the US government could purchase an additional 500 million doses under the agreement. Pfizer and BioNTech currently have several candidate vaccines in the development pipeline, including various stages of clinical trials. According to a press release issued by Pfizer, the companies aim to begin Phase 2b/3 clinical trials later this month with the goal of securing US FDA authorization for at least one vaccine by October and delivering the vaccine doses by the end of 2020. The companies also hope to expand production to a total of 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021. The agreement was signed as part of Operation Warp Speed, which has resulted in similar agreements—to support research and development, scale up manufacturing capacity, and purchase vaccine doses—with other pharmaceutical companies pursuing their own candidate vaccines.