We’ll need millions of vials to distribute the vaccine. The US government thinks manufacturing methods from the semiconductor industry can help.
As the Covid-19 crisis stretches into its seventh month, researchers around the world are continuing to work frantic hours to develop a vaccine against the coronavirus, which has so far infected 9.5 million people and killed nearly 500,000. More than 140 vaccine candidates are currently in testing, mostly in preliminary stages. A handful have reached early human studies, with three progressing to Phase III clinical trials designed to measure whether or not they confer immunity to the virus.
But the science of producing a safe, broadly effective vaccine is just the first step. Actually exiting the pandemic will require the subsequent manufacturing of the best-performing ones, bottling them up, shipping them around the world, and doling them out to vulnerable populations. In the case of Covid-19, that’s pretty much everybody on the planet, which means making somewhere between 7 and 15 billion doses. (Many vaccines have to be given in two doses—a primer and a boost.) No one has ever tried to do that before. And as these historic efforts to produce an unprecedented number of shots in so short a time are ramping up, vaccine makers say the biggest bottleneck they’re encountering is a cruelly literal one.
“The challenge is not making the vaccine itself, it’s filling vials. There just aren’t enough vials in the world,” Pascal Soriot, the executive director and CEO of AstraZeneca, told reporters in a press briefing last month. AstraZeneca is working with the University of Oxford on one of the front-runners in the Covid-19 vaccine race. But it’s just one of many pharmaceutical firms scrambling to source containers for that critical bottling step. Executives from AG Schott, one of the world’s major medical glass producers, recently told The Wall Street Journal that the company has received requests from vaccine makers for a billion vials—double what it can produce this year.
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