Center for American Progress warns of looming Covid-19 vaccine bottleneck

Two leading Democratic health policy minds are out with a new warning today: Even if a Covid-19 vaccine gains authorization in the coming months, the U.S. may be fundamentally unprepared to produce it at anywhere near the scale required to vaccinate its nearly 330 million residents.

A new Center for American Progress white paper by Zeke Emanuel and Topher Spiro argues that the current array of contracts between drug companies and manufacturers are haphazard and inefficient, my colleague Lev Facher scoops for STAT. And, they warn, basic manufacturing capacity for supplies as simple as vials, stoppers, and syringes remains entirely untested.

“It’s very plausible that we could actually have an effective vaccine, and yet it might take a year and a half or two years for 300 million Americans to get to it because we haven’t planned properly,” Emanuel told Lev in an interview. Read more here.