Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day three forty
Speaker 1: two since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Today's main
Speaker 1: story a vaccine surge is on the way as drugmakers
Speaker 1: ratchet up their production and more facilities become equipped to
Speaker 1: provide the drugs to US communities. But first, here's what
Speaker 1: happened in virus News today. Visor and bio ent Tech
Speaker 1: asked the US Food and Drug Administration for permission to
Speaker 1: store their vaccine at lower temperatures that would allow the
Speaker 1: drug to be stored for two weeks in the type
Speaker 1: of freezers pharmacies use. Making storage easier in this way
Speaker 1: could simplify distribution of the shock. The partners submitted new
Speaker 1: data showing the vaccine is stable when it is stored
Speaker 1: at minus twenty five to minus fifteen degrees celsius. Current
Speaker 1: protocol is to store the vaccine for up to six
Speaker 1: months in an ultra cold freezer at temperatures up to
Speaker 1: negative sixty degrees celsius and to ship them in a
Speaker 1: special thermal container. This limits the number of facilities that
Speaker 1: have the equipment needed to store and administer the vaccine.
Speaker 1: The European Union plans to double its cash commitment for
Speaker 1: the KOVACS program. According to an EU official familiar with
Speaker 1: the matter, the block will now contribute one billion euros
Speaker 1: to the program, which provides vaccines to poorer nations. G
Speaker 1: seven nations, including the US, the UK, and France, are
Speaker 1: also expected to pledge donations of vaccine supplies. Finally, in
Speaker 1: the US, there are early signs of a resurgence of
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen cases in the Great Plains, the area where
Speaker 1: the most recent nationwide surge started. The seven day average
Speaker 1: of new cases in North Dakota has climbed by one
Speaker 1: hundred and forty seven percent in the past week, the
Speaker 1: most in the US. According to COVID Tracking Project data.
Speaker 1: Nebraska's cases are up to the period and South Dakotas
Speaker 1: are up seventeen. The move is a reminder that while
Speaker 1: the overall trends have improved vastly, the pandemic continues and
Speaker 1: hotspots are likely to keep popping up. And now, for
Speaker 1: today's main story, the US vaccine supply is poised to
Speaker 1: double in the coming weeks and months, according to an
Speaker 1: analysis by Bloomberg, allowing a broad expansion of doses administered
Speaker 1: across the country. Currently, the US is administering one point
Speaker 1: six million doses a day, constrained by the recent supply
Speaker 1: of about ten million to fifteen million doses a week,
Speaker 1: but COVID nineteen vaccine manufacturers and US officials have accelerated
Speaker 1: the production timelines. I spoke to Senior editor Drew Armstrong,
Speaker 1: who leads Bloomberg's Vaccine Tracker. Drew said the spigots are
Speaker 1: about open, providing hundreds of millions of doses, just as
Speaker 1: pharmacies and mass vaccination sites become more equipped to administer them.
Speaker 1: Let's start with some numbers. How many COVID nineteen vaccines
Speaker 1: is the US currently distributing, and more importantly, how is
Speaker 1: that number expected to change over the coming months. That's
Speaker 1: a really good question. Um. So the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker,
Speaker 1: which is the product that I run here, we look
Speaker 1: at every day how many shots going to arms around
Speaker 1: the US. And what we see right now is that
Speaker 1: you know, about one point six one point seven million
Speaker 1: doses a day are administered in all fifty states and
Speaker 1: across some federal entities, um and some territories. And that's
Speaker 1: a number that's been really constrained essentially by supply. The
Speaker 1: US distributes anywhere from ten million to fifteen million doses
Speaker 1: a week, and if you do the math on that,
Speaker 1: you know, with a couple of little variances, one point
Speaker 1: six you know, give or take a couple hundred thousand
Speaker 1: is where you get. So we've been in this environment
Speaker 1: now for a few weeks where you know, just about
Speaker 1: every dose that gets sent out is more or less
Speaker 1: being you know, doses are being used at the same
Speaker 1: pace that they're that they're sent out, and that is
Speaker 1: not a pace that's been fast enough to cover the
Speaker 1: United States in any kind of timely fashion. We have
Speaker 1: a calculator on our website that shows, you know, at
Speaker 1: the current pace, how long would it take to cover
Speaker 1: scent of Americans with a two does vaccine? And I
Speaker 1: think right now that number is up to about nine months.
Speaker 1: I don't think that makes anybody happy. That would be
Speaker 1: sometime in the fall um heading towards the beginning of winter.
Speaker 1: But you know, we do know that more vaccine is coming.
Speaker 1: So what is going to lead to this increased supply?
Speaker 1: So I think when you think about manufacturing in this case,
Speaker 1: what is a new and complicated product. You know, these
Speaker 1: vaccines they're actually quite high technology. They're very challenging. To
Speaker 1: spin up large scale manufacturing. You need to think about
Speaker 1: a manufacturing ramp, which is what we you know, what
Speaker 1: everybody calls this where basically supply tends to start out
Speaker 1: at a trickle. More factories get broad online essentially, or
Speaker 1: the manufacturing lines in those factories they add new ones,
Speaker 1: or they make them more efficient. You look for processes
Speaker 1: and you begin to see re increases in production closer
Speaker 1: to what a maximum is. We took a very careful
Speaker 1: look at all of the public statements by the companies,
Speaker 1: you know, they have made commitments to saying we will
Speaker 1: deliver you know, X number of doses under our existing
Speaker 1: contract by this month, another hundred million doses of doses
Speaker 1: delivered by the following month, and combine all of those
Speaker 1: things together with some additional more granular timetables to show
Speaker 1: that there's actually gonna be quite a bit of vaccine
Speaker 1: supply coming in the next few months. Taken together, you know,
Speaker 1: the Fiser vaccine moderna vaccine that's likely to be authorized
Speaker 1: for use by J and J. We go from a
Speaker 1: place where we're at around you know, fifteen million doses
Speaker 1: a week now too. By the time we get to March,
Speaker 1: you know, we're really looking at more like twenty million
Speaker 1: doses a week by the time we get to April,
Speaker 1: may million a week, by the time we're in June,
Speaker 1: thirty million a week. That starts to really really add up.
Speaker 1: You're talking about, you know, by April, enough vaccine to
Speaker 1: cover a hundred and nine million Americans. By Junior, get
Speaker 1: to fifty million by July, we have more vaccine, you know,
Speaker 1: doses than we have people to give them to. Although
Speaker 1: those projections require companies to hit their targets, so it's
Speaker 1: a major caveat now to meet these deadlines, they need
Speaker 1: to actually succeed in making the stuff. But we're basing
Speaker 1: this on the numbers that they are promising, and certainly
Speaker 1: hoping that they get those right. Obviously, these numbers sound fantastic,
Speaker 1: and and the question of if they're feasible targets is
Speaker 1: a big one. I mean, we've already seen delays and
Speaker 1: production delays and shipping um obviously even right now going
Speaker 1: on with the weather, we've seen problems in getting vaccines
Speaker 1: out of communities. So I mean, even in your opinion,
Speaker 1: how how overly optimistic are these targets. Well, I don't
Speaker 1: know if I would call them overly optimistic. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think one of the things that's worth remembering about
Speaker 1: these companies is that these are very large corporations that,
Speaker 1: in my experience dealing with them, tend to be quite
Speaker 1: conservative in what they promised. That said, a lot of
Speaker 1: the promises that you know they are making recently, I
Speaker 1: think can get conflated with some of the promises of
Speaker 1: the prior administration, where there was kind of a lot
Speaker 1: of overpromise and under deliver on vaccine numbers, um. You know,
Speaker 1: but these companies are actually you know, they don't say
Speaker 1: this stuff unless they think that they can do it,
Speaker 1: because they know that if they don't that is a
Speaker 1: big disappointment and that they will be held to account,
Speaker 1: hauled up before Congress, you know, made villains in the
Speaker 1: eyes of the American public, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. They tend
Speaker 1: to be pretty conservative about how they talk about this stuff. So,
Speaker 1: you know, I think that they would not be saying
Speaker 1: this if they did not have a strong degree of
Speaker 1: confidence that they will meet these targets. Now, I want
Speaker 1: to pause real quickly here and saying there's a lot
Speaker 1: of other stuff that can go wrong. Look at this,
Speaker 1: a storm that has more or less put vaccinations in
Speaker 1: Texas on hold. If you dig into our vaccine tracker,
Speaker 1: you can actually take a look and see that Texas
Speaker 1: took a huge hit on the terms of the number
Speaker 1: of vaccines that it's been able to administer over the
Speaker 1: last several days. You know, I mean things can go wrong,
Speaker 1: whether UM shipping issues. We may get to a point
Speaker 1: where you know, we've never we haven't distributed this vaccine
Speaker 1: as much anymore. There could be distribution bottlenecks. We don't
Speaker 1: know if there might be some you know, long term
Speaker 1: side effect that we're not aware of that causes one
Speaker 1: of these vaccines to either be pulled from the market
Speaker 1: or limited in use. There's a lot of variables here.
Speaker 1: This is not just manufacturing UM. You know, and I've
Speaker 1: been taught in this pandemic that you know, if stuff
Speaker 1: can't go wrong, it will go wrong. So you know,
Speaker 1: I really want to caution people. This is a model
Speaker 1: of what companies are saying. There are many other moving
Speaker 1: pieces in this big vaccine machine that have to all
Speaker 1: keep moving and not breaking down and or or for
Speaker 1: this to work. And you raise a really important point
Speaker 1: that supply, just the quantity of vaccines is maybe not
Speaker 1: even half the battle, but only a piece of this
Speaker 1: very complicated puzzle. So assuming that we will have this
Speaker 1: increased supply of vaccines going into the spring and even
Speaker 1: into the summer, I mean what has been announced as
Speaker 1: far as plans on local, state, federal government lines to
Speaker 1: make sure this increased supply will get distributed and into arms. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the really interesting things that has been happening
Speaker 1: and actually gave us a little bit more confidence in
Speaker 1: writing this story, was not just looking at in isolation
Speaker 1: the statements by the companies, but you know what is
Speaker 1: actually happening on the ground in order to kind of
Speaker 1: widen the you know, the pipeline, you know, for the
Speaker 1: last mile of getting these things from factory to arm, etcetera.
Speaker 1: I think if you look around the country, there is
Speaker 1: a building of vaccine and indistration capacity that's been going on.
Speaker 1: Michigan's top health officials said earlier this month that we
Speaker 1: could be doing eighty thousand doses a day. We're only getting,
Speaker 1: you know, but if you look at what they're actually getting,
Speaker 1: the number of doses they're getting to be able to
Speaker 1: administer it's you know, anywhere from thirty thousand to fifty
Speaker 1: thousand doses a day less than that. FEMA has been
Speaker 1: opening up mass vaccination centers around the country. They have
Speaker 1: a pop upsite in Delaware that's going to go for
Speaker 1: six days and do three thousand people a day. Football
Speaker 1: stadiums are being turned into mass vaccination centers. Um. You
Speaker 1: know in San Francisco, the forty nine or stadium, they
Speaker 1: say they can do fifteen thousand doses a day there. Um.
Speaker 1: This is happening all around the country where there is
Speaker 1: this building of administration capacity. You know, they've pulled retired
Speaker 1: nurses and doctors back into service and said, hey, come
Speaker 1: help out with this. Pharmacies are now beginning to be
Speaker 1: shipped vaccine for use by the general public. Those are
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of locations. I think one of the
Speaker 1: things that have to remember, you know, a good comparison
Speaker 1: to this is like the Nursing Home program, where the
Speaker 1: big drug store chains were contracted with to go out
Speaker 1: and vaccinate people in the nursing homes and actually went
Speaker 1: really really slowly. I think people thought that, oh, this
Speaker 1: will be great, We'll hire these big companies that have
Speaker 1: locations everywhere. They'll sweep across America and vaccinate all the
Speaker 1: old people in the nursing homes who are the folks
Speaker 1: who are most vulnerable to this disease and really need
Speaker 1: these vaccines. That's not what happened. It turns out it
Speaker 1: is way easier and more efficient to tell ten thousand
Speaker 1: people to, you know, or fifteen thousand people, Hey, drive
Speaker 1: to the football stadium that every Sunday in the fall
Speaker 1: is used to handling a hundred thousand people getting in
Speaker 1: and out of this place. Line you all up and
Speaker 1: vaccinate you. That's easy to do, that's efficient to do.
Speaker 1: What's really hard to do is to say, Okay, you're
Speaker 1: gonna have to go drive out to tiny, little essentially
Speaker 1: you know, nursing homes all around the country and go
Speaker 1: door to door vaccinating fragile ninety year old who have
Speaker 1: to be handled with extreme care and caution because of
Speaker 1: their susceptibility to the ZA. We are moving into a
Speaker 1: place where the efficiency on the administration side really begins
Speaker 1: to ramp up. From the federal government perspective. You know
Speaker 1: what has the ad Biden administration said as far as
Speaker 1: their goals for having America vaccinated. I mean, have they
Speaker 1: taken into account this new supply line of vaccines and
Speaker 1: adjusted their timetable at all. One of the things it's
Speaker 1: a very interesting contrast between this current administration and the
Speaker 1: prior administration is that they seem to be quite conscious
Speaker 1: about being conservative and not overpromising how they're going to
Speaker 1: deliver these vaccines. And you see comments that kind of
Speaker 1: look like trying to talk both ways about this, where
Speaker 1: on one hand they say, things are going great, We're
Speaker 1: hitting all our targets. Look how wonderful we're doing, and
Speaker 1: really trying to you know, count their own winds on this,
Speaker 1: you know, on the other hand, they say, whoa wa, whoa,
Speaker 1: be careful, all we won't have all these vaccines until July,
Speaker 1: which is a month later than what we project. You know,
Speaker 1: we see them talking down production of the Johnson and
Speaker 1: Johnson vaccine a little bit, saying, well, we expect that
Speaker 1: to be a very very slow ramp. I think there's
Speaker 1: a little bit of you know, both political and public
Speaker 1: health expectations setting um going on here. If I had
Speaker 1: to take a guess where, you know, one, you don't
Speaker 1: want people to think, you know, yeah, you know, I'll
Speaker 1: have a vaccine next week, so I can go and
Speaker 1: give up all the good public health measures that I've
Speaker 1: been practicing for a year now. Um, you know. You also,
Speaker 1: at the same time, I don't want to give people
Speaker 1: the mindset they're like, hey, the vaccine is never getting here,
Speaker 1: so why even bother I'm going to give up. For
Speaker 1: that reason, I think they're trying to walk a little
Speaker 1: bit of a fine line from a public health standpoint
Speaker 1: while also trying to control the narrative from a political standpoint.
Speaker 1: You know, we'll see if they adjust those projections, and
Speaker 1: and obviously we intend to you know, keep on the
Speaker 1: companies that are manufacturing these and hold them to account,
Speaker 1: um and call out if they don't hit their missed
Speaker 1: targets um. You know, and we'll be keeping an eye
Speaker 1: on the Biden administration as well. That was Drew Armstrong
Speaker 1: and that's it for our show today. For coverage of
Speaker 1: the outbreak from one twenty bureaus around the world, visit
Speaker 1: Bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus and if you like the show,
Speaker 1: please leave us a review and a rating on Apple
Speaker 1: Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more
Speaker 1: listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is
Speaker 1: produced by Tophur foreheads Magnus Henrickson and me Laura Carlson.
Speaker 1: Today's main story was reported by Drew Armstrong. Original music
Speaker 1: by Leo Sidrin. Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesco Levi.
Speaker 1: Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.