Moderna And Pfizer Need To Nearly Double COVID-19 Vaccine Deliveries To Meet Goals

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JANUARY 22: A COVID-19 vaccine hub taking appointments only stands in Brooklyn as the city begins to run low on doses on January 22, 2021 in New York City. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced at a press conference that New York City has canceled 23,000 first-dose COVID-19 vaccine appointments this … Continued

Spencer Platt / Getty Images

With a spotlight on COVID-19 vaccine distribution shortcomings, there’s another bottleneck that could prevent inoculations from significantly speeding up in the near future: Pfizer’s and Moderna’s ability to scale up manufacturing and deliver doses to the U.S. government.

The companies promised to deliver 100 million doses apiece to the United States by the end of March. But they’ll need to make huge leaps in a short time to meet that goal.

In the last few weeks, they’ve each been steadily delivering about 4.3 million doses a week, according to an NPR examination of vaccine allocation data. But to hit their targets of 100 million doses on time, they each need to deliver 7.5 million doses a week for the next nine weeks.