According to the newspaper, Pfizer's announcement means that the US government may not be able to ramp up the supply of the company's vaccine as quickly as it expected. This, in turn, raises doubts about whether the US authorities will be able to adhere to the schedule and vaccinate the majority of the country's population by the end of spring or early summer.
The Trump administration denies that the country may face problems with vaccine availability in the second quarter of 2021, citing other drugs in development. However, several officials familiar with the contracts said that vaccine supplies from other companies might not be enough to fill the gap.
In July, Germany's BioNTech, which worked on the COVID-19 vaccine with Pfizer, said that the companies reached an agreement with the US authorities on supplying up to 600 million doses of their vaccine. According to the company, after receiving the first 100 million doses, Washington will pay BioNTech and Pfizer $1.95 billion. The US will be able to acquire up to an additional 500 million doses.
Earlier in December, the Wall Street Journal reported that Pfizer expected to ship just about half of the COVID-19 vaccines it originally planned for this year because of supply-chain problems, although it still expects to roll out more than a billion doses in 2021. In particular, the companies hoped to roll out 100 million doses world-wide by the end of this year, but now, the plan has been reduced to 50 million.
The two-shot vaccine by Pfizer and BioNTech, which has 95 percent efficacy, is expected to receive emergency-use authorization by the US Food and Drug Administration in the near future. Last week, the United Kingdom became the first Western country to grant emergency-use authorization for the vaccine.