The Pop-Up Vaccine Factories

Prognosis: Misconception

Bloomberg

Health & Fitness, Science

4.1 • 838 Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2021

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On the outskirts of Marburg, a small college town in Germany, coronavirus vaccine manufacturer BioNTech has spent five frantic months renovating one of its factories to produce mRNA. Demand for the vaccine has been so massive that the Pfizer-BioNTech partnership can’t meet it with its existing facilities--hence the race to retrofit factories that weren't initially designed to support the vaccine. Naomi Kresge reports that success would mean being able to vaccinate about 375 million more people per year, and help bring the pandemic under control.

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0:00.0	What could you do if your data was working for you and not against you? With Bloomberg delivering
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0:14.1	higher level analysis, and financial data experts committed to helping you maximize your every move.
0:24.0	Our data is made for more, so you can show the world what you're made of. Visit Bloomberg.com slash enterprise data to learn more.
0:31.1	Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day 335 since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic.
0:41.2	Today's main story, demand for the Pfizer Bio-Ntech vaccine has outstripped the partnership's ability to produce it fast enough.
0:51.7	So they're turning to creative solutions, like retrofitting factories that were
0:57.4	designed to do other things. But first, here's what happened in virus news today.
1:09.5	President Joe Biden announced that the U.S. will pay $1.95 billion for an additional 100 million doses of the Pfizer-COVID-19 vaccine.
1:23.4	The amount is consistent with agreements made for the prior 200 million doses bought by the government.
1:30.3	That's according to a statement from Pfizer today.
1:34.6	Biden said the government was also acquiring 100 million doses of the vaccine made by Moderna.
1:43.4	The UK government said it is confident the country's coronavirus epidemic is shrinking.
1:50.5	The reproduction rate of the disease, that's the average number of people a COVID-19
1:55.6	infected person transmits it to, dropped to levels last seen in July. New data from the Office for National Statistics
2:05.3	also showed coronavirus infections fell for a fourth week, with around one in 80 people in England
2:12.8	having the disease versus one in 65 people the previous week.
2:19.0	Finally, a new study shows that blood-thinning drugs reduce the risk of death from COVID-19.
2:27.3	It's one more promising tool as physicians scour their medicine cabinets for treatments to fight the pandemic.
2:36.1	About 14% of patients who were given the anticoagulant heparin within 24 hours of hospital admission died from the coronavirus,
2:47.0	compared with 19% of those who weren't given the anticoagulant.
2:52.3	That's according to a study published today in the British Medical Journal.
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