Inside the Facilities Making the World's Most Prevalent COVID-19 Vaccine
During an address earlier today, President Joe Biden announced that the U.S. has reached an impressive milestone: 200 million COVID-19 vaccine doses administered. The feat comes a week before Biden's 100th day in office; he originally set a goal of administering 100 million shots by his hundredth day in the job.
A lot of that speed and efficiency is due to the manufacturers who have provided the U.S. with a steady stream of vaccines—most notably BioNTech, which makes the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. So far, the U.S. has administered about 113.4 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, compared to about 94.6 million Moderna doses and nearly 8 million Janssen/Johnson & Johnson doses.
TIME's Aryn Baker and photographer Luca Locatelli recently visited BioNTech's Marburg, Germany facility, which runs day and night to churn out several million doses each week. They got an inside look at a high-tech company founded by a husband-and-wife team of scientists, Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, BioNTech was working on mRNA-based cancer vaccines. But during the early days of the outbreak, Sahin realized that BioNTech needed to switch gears to create an mRNA vaccine against the novel coronavirus.
"He quickly realized that the promising results they were seeing from their cancer vaccine tests meant they had a pretty good chance of developing a successful mRNA vaccine against COVID-19," says my colleague Alice Park, who wrote the story with Aryn.
The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, of course, became the first novel coronavirus shot to be authorized in the U.S., and the first ever to use the genetic material mRNA. The manufacturing process is no less impressive, as evidenced by Locatelli's work. He captured gleaming stainless-steel tanks housing fragments of mRNA coding, machinery that caps hundreds of vials every minute, and rows of deep freezers containing the life-saving finished product.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime project," said one employee of the company. "Who can say that they're part of the solution for a pandemic? Only a few people can say that."
More than 272 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been shipped to various U.S. states as of yesterday afternoon, of which some 213 million doses have been administered, according to TIME's vaccine tracker. About 26% of Americans have been completely vaccinated.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a harsh rebuke today of Emergent BioSolutions, the Baltimore plant where millions of Johnson & Johnson doses were manufactured and then thrown out because of contamination concerns. The FDA inspected the plant and cited nine violations, including failures to disinfect equipment, safeguard for vaccine purity and strength, and prevent contamination. No vaccines produced at Emergent have been distributed or used in the U.S. "We will not allow the release of any product until we feel confident that it meets our expectations for quality," FDA officials said in a statement.
Counterfeit vaccine doses continue to be an issue around the world, the Wall Street Journal reports. In Mexico, 80 people recently took fraudulent doses of what they believed to be the Pfizer vaccine. The fake vaccines, which haven't appeared to cause physical harm, cost about $1,000 a dose. In Poland, authorities recently seized vials of a counterfeit vaccine—likely containing an anti-wrinkle serum—from a man's apartment, but no one had taken the counterfeit treatment. These are the first known instances of counterfeit versions of the Pfizer vaccine, though fake versions of other vaccines had been previously discovered. None have been reported so far in the U.S.
TODAY'S CORONAVIRUS OUTLOOK
The Global Situation
More than 142.6 million people around the world had been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of 1 a.m. E.T. today, and more than 3 million people have died. On April 20, there were 552,257 new cases and 12,108 new deaths confirmed globally.
Here's how the world as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
And here is every country with over 2.5 million confirmed cases:
France is still under a partial lockdown, but government spokesman Gabriel Attal announced today that the country would likely lift domestic travel restrictions on May 3, the Associated Press reports. However, he added that travelers from India will have to quarantine for 10 days upon arriving in France in order to guard against a highly contagious variant spreading there. Travelers from Brazil, Argentina and Chile also face additional restrictions when visiting France.
More than 1 million people in Iraq have now tested positive for COVID-19, CNN reports, while the country also reported a single-day record of 8,696 new cases today. Iraq's vaccine rollout is moving slowly; less than 1% of its nearly 40 million-person population has been vaccinated. Baghdad is expecting 16 million additional doses from four companies, though it's unclear when the shots will arrive.
COVID-19 has been found for the first time among people attempting to scale Mount Everest, the New York Times reports. Several climbers tested positive at a hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal, after being flown in from Everest Base Camp. The outbreak is a potential deterrent to tourism in the area, a key economic driver. In Nepal, more than 287,000 people have tested positive since the start of the pandemic, and 3,102 have died.
The Situation in the U.S.
The U.S. had recorded more than 31.7 million coronavirus cases as of 1 a.m. E.T. today. More than 568,400 people have died. On April 20, there were 54,146 new cases and 767 new deaths confirmed in the U.S.
Here's how the country as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
The Biden Administration announced today that U.S. companies with fewer than 500 employees will be reimbursed for providing employees with time off to get vaccinated and recover from any side effects. The paid leave tax credit will cover time off between April 1 and September 30, 2021.
Even though the vaccines authorized for use in the U.S. are extraordinarily effective, it's still possible to get COVID-19 after being fully vaccinated, as a paper published today in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report demonstrates. In the study, researchers looked at 75 skilled nursing facilities in Chicago after residents and staff had the opportunity to get vaccinated. They found 627 infections, 22 of which were identified in fully vaccinated people. Sixty-four percent of these so-called "breakthrough" infections were asymptomatic, but two vaccinated residents were hospitalized and one died. Still, because so few vaccinated people were infected or developed severe disease, the study suggests that getting vaccinated—especially in a group-living setting—helps protect you and those around you.
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of April 21, 1 a.m. E.T. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
What It's Like to Be an Extrovert During the Pandemic
TIME editor and extrovert Belinda Luscombe explains how she coped with more than a year of being deprived of desperately needed human contact. "I took my raging inner social butterfly and started to say hello to anyone in my vicinity," she writes—starting with the mailman. Read more here.
We Need to Change How We Talk About the Climate Crisis
The climate crisis demands drastic change—something foreign to our way of life until now. But "during the pandemic, businesses, governments and people made sudden, severe changes to stay safe," writes social critic John Freeman for TIME—showing that rapid, life-altering changes to curb climate change are possible. Read more here.
Why Now Is a Crucial Moment to Get Vaccinated
It's never been a more dangerous time to be unvaccinated against COVID-19, writes Dr. Robert Wachter in the Washington Post. A highly contagious variant has replaced the original virus as the most prevalent in the U.S.—yet the improving situation for vaccinated people might be masking this danger for those who remain unvaccinated. Read more here.
Thanks for reading. We hope you find the Coronavirus Brief newsletter to be a helpful tool to navigate this very complex situation, and welcome feedback at coronavirus.brief@time.com. If you have specific questions you'd like us to answer, please send them to covidquestions@time.com.
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Today's newsletter was written by Mandy Oaklander and edited by Alex Fitzpatrick.
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