At a plant nestled along a highway 20 miles north of Boston, hundreds of Pfizer Inc. workers are gearing up to produce millions of doses of a new vaccine that looks more and more like the next phase of fighting Covid-19.
Work on the project started the day after Thanksgiving at the 70-acre facility in Andover, Massachusetts, just as the World Health Organization designated a new coronavirus strain, omicron, a variant of concern. The goal of the effort: make a booster shot customized against the highly mutated virus in less than 100 days.
Nobody yet knows how widely omicron will spread, how serious its infections will be or even whether the new shots will be necessary. Top White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci has said that reports on severity have so far been “encouraging.’’ But if laboratory data rolling in from around the world are reliable, the strain is better able to sidestep existing vaccines than any to date.
Of 43 U.S. omicron infections analyzed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, four-fifths were in fully vaccinated people, although almost all the cases were relatively mild. U.K. health officials expect omicron to overtake delta as the dominant strain there within days.
Researchers are alarmed by some 30 mutations in omicron’s spike, the protein that facilitates coronavirus’s entry to cells. Changes in its appearance make it harder for antibodies to find and destroy the variant. That’s prompted Pfizer, its partner BioNTech SE and their messenger RNA rival Moderna Inc. to start crash efforts to target it directly.
“It was the list of mutations we never wanted to see,” said Moderna President Stephen Hoge, who heads the company’s scientific operations. The vaccine maker, whose mRNA factory stands just 40 miles from Pfizer’s, started working on omicron the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and meetings ran straight through the holiday. Many employees “had their Thanksgivings ruined” by omicron, Hoge said.
Early lab data suggest that three doses of existing mRNA vaccines protect against omicron. What’s less clear is how long that protection lasts, since Covid antibodies have been seen to wane over time. Pfizer hopes to have the first real-world effectiveness data about how its existing vaccine fares against the variant before the end of the year.
While the companies are tight-lipped about the details of exactly where they stand, both are bent on a fast response. When news of the variant emerged from South Africa, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla decided almost immediately to begin large-scale manufacturing of an omicron-specific shot. The work ramped up so quickly that Pfizer hasn’t tallied its costs.
“I couldn’t give you the number right now; I’m not even sure we talked about it,” said Mike McDermott, Pfizer’s global supply chain head, who gives Bourla regular updates on progress. It’s very unusual for a drug company to start large-scale manufacturing on a product that may not be needed, he said.
The production process at Andover could start any day now, McDermott said. Workers are waiting for company researchers in Chesterfield, Missouri, to finalize and deliver a master cell line containing a genetic sequence that will be used in the targeted vaccine.
Pfizer’s Andover plant, acquired in 2009 in the $68 billion purchase of vaccine maker Wyeth, specializes in biologic products. For the Covid vaccine, it performs two early steps: producing large quantities of a DNA template for the vaccine from the cell line, and then converting that into the mRNA that forms the core of the vaccine.