© Reuters. Image of a nurse filling syringes with coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccines for immunocompromised residents aged 50 and over who may receive their second booster shots in Waterford, Michigan.
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Sep 20 (Reuters) – The U.S. government has shipped over 25 million updated booster doses for COVID-19, mostly from Pfizer / BioNTech, as Moderna’s vaccine production continues to grow, a health agency reported Tuesday. federal.
Some US pharmacies, including CVS Health (NYSE 🙂 and Walgreens (NASDAQ 🙂 Boots Alliance, also reported Tuesday that the government supply of Moderna’s updated vaccine remains limited, causing appointments for the product worldwide to vary.
In a statement late Tuesday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it had authorized 10 batches of Moderna’s updated booster vaccines produced at a facility in Catalent, Indiana after it was deemed safe for the drug. use. He did not provide details on the number of authorized doses.
Catalent’s facilities are currently not licensed by the FDA to produce Moderna’s upgraded booster vaccines, and the regulator said the company has asked for these batches to be phased out in light of current supply issues.
Both CVS and Walgreens said they are working with the government to purchase more doses of Moderna and have not encountered any supply issues for the Pfizer / BioNTech booster.
In August, the FDA cleared updated booster vaccines for Pfizer (NYSE 🙂 and Moderna target omicron’s dominant BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants as the country prepares for a large vaccination campaign in the fall.
According to the Department of Health’s Office of the Deputy Secretary for Preparation and Response (ASPR), retail pharmacies will receive millions more doses of Moderna this week and production is increasing.
“We expect supply to continue to increase in the coming weeks,” an ASPR spokesperson told Reuters.
Moderna said it is working closely with the US government to provide significant quantities of upgraded and bivalent boosters and expects these availability limitations to be resolved in the coming days.
He added that he hopes to ship all 70 million doses by the end of the year, as promised in his contract.
The United States has ordered more than 170 million booster doses of the updated vaccine this fall, when all people 12 years of age and older who have already received initial doses of the vaccine are encouraged to receive a booster dose.
(Reported by Mrinalika Roy, Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru and Michael Erman in New York; Spanish editing by Ricardo Figueroa)
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