US offering investment to boost COVID-19 vaccine capacity

By ZEKE MILLER
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is making billions of dollars available to drugmakers to scale up domestic production of COVID-19 vaccines in the hopes of building capacity to produce an additional 1 billion shots per year to share globally. Under the new initiative previewed Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority is soliciting pharmaceutical companies that have demonstrated the ability to make the more-effective mRNA vaccines to bid for government investment in scaling up their manufacturing abilities. Drugmakers Pfizer and Moderna produce the two U.S.-approved mRNA shots. The Biden administration believes the boosted capacity of COVID-19 shots would help ease a global shortage of doses.