Pfizer and BioNTech up Covid vaccine production capacity to 3 billion doses in 2021

The CEO of BioNTech has said that the company and its partner Pfizer have been able to further increase production capacity of its highly sought-after Covid-19 vaccine, upping supply to around three billion doses in 2021.

Speaking at a webcast event organized by the Financial Times on Tuesday, BioNTech’s CEO and co-founder Ugur Sahin said that the company had been fortunate so far and was “not facing too many technical problems and keeping our delivery schedules.” 

Sahin said that production manufacturing capacity had now been ramped up to allow for the manufacturing of three billion BioNTech-Pfizer shots in 2021, up from a previous target of 2.5 billion.

Our teams did a great job to further increase the manufacturing scale to come up now with numbers reaching three billion doses.

In March, the Mainz-based biotech company said that its partners at Pfizer had increased their production capacity, allowing for 2.5 billion to be manufactured this year, of which 1.4 billion had already been sold. 

Last week, Moderna President Stephen Hoge said that his company would produce as many as three billion shots of their own jab in 2022, depending on how many shots are lower-dose formulations for boosters and immunization for children.

The comments came after Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel warned that the world may have an oversupply of Covid-19 vaccines in 2022 and this could be challenging for developers such as themselves.

China claims it will have the capacity to produce five billion jabs by the end of the year, while, Britain, a relatively small country by population, will be manufacturing at least three vaccines, AstraZeneca, Novavax and Valneva, before the end of 2021. Neither country is likely to manufacture the Pfizer or Moderna jab. 

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