We’re bombarded every day with news about the latest miracle vaccine candidate: when it will be available, which vaccines have reached clinical trials, the stock market performance of the manufacturers, and so on.
But four critical questions are not adequately discussed:
- Can any of these vaccines be manufactured at scale?
- How often do people need to be vaccinated… annually? Every 6 months?
- Who gets the first 100 million doses? The first billion?
- How do we reliably distribute these doses? Can we?
Manufacturing and distributing billions of doses of a COVID-19 vaccine will be one of the biggest logistical challenges in history.
Because I’m in the midst of building a vaccine company (COVAXX), I’m thinking about these issues and closely tracking the industry on a daily basis. It’s an understatement to say that there are a lot of challenges ahead.
In this blog, I want to address the four challenges listed above, give you a quick overview of what my own company COVAXX is doing, and provide an overview of the other players. Ultimately, I’m hoping that many will succeed. We need them all.
Let’s dive in.
Want to learn more? Join me, Tony Robbins, and the co-CEOs of COVAXX THIS WEDNESDAY, August 5th for a detailed Webinar at 1pm PT / 4pm ET to learn more… Bring your friends and family: you will want to be among the first to know about this vaccine and its extraordinary potential.
Sign up HERE.
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My disclosure: I’ve personally been working on COVAXX non-stop since March.
While I normally focus on a half-dozen companies (XPRIZE, Singularity University, BOLD Capital, Abundance, FutureLoop and more), the magnitude of COVID-19 and the power of this vaccine is so compelling, that I’ve put almost everything else on hold to get this technology to the finish line…
Here are four of the roadblocks to manufacturing and distributing a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine.
- Having an ability to scale -- fast!
We need 4.4 billion annual doses to vaccinate adults worldwide. That number will increase if we also have to vaccinate children. And it will increase further if more than one dose per adult is required. (Note: Most scientists believe that two doses per adult will be needed, a primary and a booster shot some weeks later.)
Meeting this challenge will likely require the combined output of several vaccine manufactures over the next 12-18 months.
Several of the top vaccine candidates, including the AstraZeneca / Oxford partnership, Moderna, and Pfizer, have committed to producing at least 100 million doses in 2020. Additionally, each company has pledged to produce at least 1 billion doses in 2021.
COVAXX has also committed to producing 100 million COVID-19 vaccine doses by early Q1 2021, and 1 billion doses by the end of next year.
But plans are not enough. Execution of these goals is essential for our collective success.
- Using a commercially proven manufacturing platform
One major concern is the fact that several of the leading vaccine candidates rely on manufacturing platforms that haven’t yet been commercially proven, meaning that the vaccine has only been manufactured in small doses thus far.
For example, Moderna’s and Pfizer’s mRNA-based vaccine is based on a technology platform that has never been approved for human use. We don’t know if the tech can reliably be scaled to handle hundreds of millions and eventually billions of doses in the timeframe we need.
One major advantage that COVAXX is offering the world is proven manufacturing. The same technology platform being used to manufacture our COVID-19 vaccine already produces >500 million animal vaccines per year, and has produced over 5 billion doses in total to date. It works and it’s cheap.
- Ensuring that distribution is reliable
Even the safest and most effective vaccine won’t work if it can’t reach patients.
One major concern is that some of today’s top vaccine candidates (specifically the mRNA vaccines) require storage in freezers at -112 degrees Fahrenheit (-80 degrees Celsius) for the vaccine to be effective and not degrade. That means using liquid nitrogen.
That may work in a factory or a warehouse.
But most clinics, doctor’s offices, and pharmacies don’t have such sophisticated storage technology.
So how do we get these vaccines to an individual patient?
Now consider the billions of people we need to reach in remote regions and emerging economies where normal refrigeration is a problem, let alone keeping vaccines at -112 degrees Fahrenheit (-80 degrees Celsius).
In our interconnected world, an outbreak anywhere is an outbreak everywhere.
Again, I’m proud that the COVAXX platform uses a “synthetic peptide technology” that only requires normal (widely available) refrigeration. UBI (COVAXX’s parent company) currently distributes synthetic peptide vaccines to millions of farmers in rural China who have no special infrastructure. We know that it works, is robust, and is easy to distribute.
- Distributing the vaccines in an ethical way
The truth is, this will not be a winner-takes-all model. We’ll likely need multiple vaccines from different manufacturers to meet the high demand. And for this reason, I wish all of the vaccine teams great success.
But even then, there are critical questions that we’re not sufficiently discussing in the media.
Who should get the vaccine first? Healthcare workers? The elderly? What about waiters? Are corporate executives more essential than grocery store clerks?
These are some of the questions we’ll have to answer as the first vaccines become available.
To address these questions, COVAXX was the first company (that I know of) to announce the formation of a Vaccine Advisory Working Group composed of doctors, economists, ethicists, and policymakers to help us answer these questions in an informed and ethical way.
I’m privileged to be part of such a brilliant team that’s dedicated to a singular mission: defeating COVID-19.
If you’d like to learn more and educate yourself about the industry and about COVAXX, please JOIN TONY ROBBINS & ME as we interview the Co-CEOs (Mei Mei Hu & Lou Reese) about COVAXX, the plan for manufacturing and distributing the vaccine, and much more.
A LIVE Q&A will follow the webinar.
Webinar Date: August 5th at 1pm PT / 4pm ET.
Click HERE to register for this free webinar, and we look forward to seeing you there!
Warmest wishes,
Peter
Here is a sample of several companies’ planned production of COVID-19 vaccines.
Company | # Doses (2020) | # Doses (2021) |
COVAXX | 100 million (Q1 2021) | ~1 billion |
Astrazeneca / Oxford1 | >400 million | ~2 billion |
Inovio2 | >1 million | >100 million |
Moderna3 | 100 million | ~1 billion |
Novavax4 | 10 - 100 million | >1 billion |
Pfizer5 | >100 million | 1.3 billion |
Sanofi / GSK6 | 100 million | 1 billion |
This is as The United States threatened further action against China as noted by the Financial Times of London--and as the Attorney General of the United States was before the US House Judiciary Committee:
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Pompeo vows further clampdown as ByteDance tries to salvage sale talks with Microsoft AUGUST 2, 2020 by Aime Williams in Washington
 |  | | Keeping up with politics is easy now. | | |
| | | Attorney General William P. Barr testified Tuesday for the first time in his tenure in front of a critical congressional audience — a House Judiciary Committee with a Democratic majority — as the Justice Department faces questions from critics who say it is helping President Trump politically in ways ranging from policing and protests to intervening in criminal investigations of Trump allies. “In your time at the department,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold E. Nadler (D-N.Y.) said in his opening statement, “you have aided and abetted the worst failings of this president.” Barr came ready to defend himself from such accusations, an opportunity Republicans on the committee repeatedly gave him. Here are five takeaways from Barr’s testimony.  Attorney General William Barr testifies Tuesday. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post/POOL) |
1. He is all in as a partisan playerBy now, Barr has established himself as a loyal defender of Trump, willing to make decisions that at the very least give the appearance that he is doing Trump’s personal bidding. Barr denies that politics play a role in his decisions while leading the Justice Department. But Tuesday, he did little to refute the criticism that Trump’s personal desires influence him. In his efforts to defend himself, Barr painted Trump as the consummate professional president, giving Barr “complete freedom” to do what he needs. “From my experience, the president has played a role properly and traditionally played by presidents,” Barr testified. We don’t know what happens behind closed doors between Trump and Barr, but Barr’s projection of the president is just not consistent with Trump’s public comments on law enforcement, which he regularly attacks when investigations don’t go his way. Here he is after his friend Roger Stone was sentenced to more than three years in prison. In his written opening statement, Barr accused Democrats in Congress of trying to “discredit” him. And Barr asserted that his repeated efforts to change the direction of investigations of Trump allies were influenced only by the rule of law. “I am supposedly punishing the president’s enemies and helping his friends,” Barr said. He challenged his critics to point to one enemy he has unfairly indicted. On the friends front, Barr said, “The president’s friends don’t deserve special breaks, but they also don’t deserve to be treated more harshly than other people.” He referred to two recent controversies: - Reducing Stone’s sentence, an act that led all four federal prosecutors on the case to resign from the case in protest. One testified to Congress last month that the Justice Department reduced the sentence for “political reasons.” (Stone got the lower sentence, then Trump commuted that sentence altogether. Barr has implied he doesn’t agree with the commutation.) “Do you think it’s fair for a 67-year-old man to be sentenced to prison for seven to nine years?” Barr said.
- Doing an about-face on former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, dropping charges to which Flynn had previously pleaded guilty. “There was no basis to investigate Flynn,” Barr said of the FBI. (Justice Department officials involved in the investigation at the time disagree.)
But his opening statement moved neither side. “Your opening statement reads like it was written by Alex Jones or Roger Stone,” Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) told Barr, referring to two combative Trump allies. 2. Under increased scrutiny, Barr is not backing down from sending federal agents into citiesThere is a chasm between how Barr, Trump and their Republican defenders in Congress view federal police presence in U.S. cities and how Democrats and many protesters see it. Barr is arguing that Portland, Ore., officials abdicated their duty to keep the peace and that federal officials had to take over to protect the federal courthouse. “What unfolds nightly around the courthouse cannot reasonably be called a protest; it is, by any objective measure, an assault on the government of the United States,” Barr said in his opening statement. Democrats argue that Trump is co-opting federal law enforcement for his political benefit, mainly to scare suburban voters into voting for him and to distract from his failure to keep the coronavirus in check. And they accuse Barr of being a willing ally. The protests across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis in May had been fizzling — until Barr sent federal agents to Portland, where there were still some nightly clashes between protesters and police. That has stirred up more protests across the nation. Now the Justice Department inspector general’s office is investigating federal police actions against protesters in Portland, where demonstrators report being clubbed and thrown into unmarked vans. It will also look at what happened in D.C., where in June federal agents fired chemical agents at largely peaceful protesters, clearing a park across from the White House. Barr continued to deny that agents fired tear gas. But the chemical compounds in what they fired are basically the same thing. Barr is also sending federal police to other cities as part of what he says is a separate project to help fight violent crime, not quell protests. Some mayors, including in Chicago and Kansas City, Mo., have said they’ll cautiously welcome the help as long as it’s not targeted at stirring up trouble on the streets. “Understandably, Americans are very suspicious of your motives here,” Nadler said. 3. Barr doesn’t think police have a racism problemBarr was willing to acknowledge some racial inequities in how police treat black Americans. But he referred as history: “Given our history, it’s understandable that among black Americans, there’s some ambivalence and often distrust toward the police. Until just the last 50 years ago or so, our laws and our institutions were explicitly racist, explicitly discriminatory.” Under questioning, Barr was not willing to say there is systemic racism among police in the United States. He tried to cite statistics that show the opposite. Barr said he’s seen studies that said “police are less likely to shoot at a black suspect, a little more likely to shoot at a white suspect.” He also cited Washington Post tallies of police shootings that show eight unarmed black men have been fatally shot by police in 2020, compared with 11 unarmed white people. He didn’t note white people make up a far greater share of the U.S. population, and when you look at the data in a more representative way, black people are unequivocally shot by police at a higher rate than white people. 4. Barr continued to cast doubt about voting by mailBarr has said multiple times that he’s worried about foreign actors manipulating voting by mail at a large scale in November. He repeated that Tuesday. But Barr has no evidence to back up that concern, and election officials say what he’s warning about is unlikely. Here’s the deal: Among the five states that vote by mail statewide and the thousands of absentee ballots cast every year, there is no evidence that voting by mail leads to substantial voter fraud. A number of states have practices to confirm absentee ballots, making them difficult-to-impossible to duplicate on a massive scale. To do so, bad actors would have to know a person’s personal signature and correct address. They would have to mail ballots in the same envelopes that the state is using in a way that doesn’t attract election officials’ attention by duplicating ballots among those who have voted. All of this from a foreign country. What some election experts warn is more likely than widespread fraud is that Barr and Trump’s comments lead to widespread suspicion about the outcome of the race. If Trump were to clearly lose and not leave office, claiming fraud, there would be nothing clear in the rule book for what to do then. At the least, Barr responded under questioning that if a president clearly loses an election, the president has no remedy for contesting it. 5. Barr hesitates to say a president shouldn’t accept foreign help to get electedIn probably one of the most stunning exchanges of the day, Barr at first did not denounce clearly illegal behavior. The question was from Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.). Cicilline: Is it ever appropriate, sir, for the president to solicit or accept foreign assistance in an election?Barr: It depends what kind of assistance. Cicilline: Is it ever appropriate for the president or presidential candidate to accept or solicit foreign assistance of any kind in his or her election? Barr: No, it’s not appropriate.
Foreign help, of any kind, in an election is absolutely illegal. The House impeached Trump in late 2019 on accusations that he tried to get Ukraine to make former vice president Joe Biden, now his 2020 opponent, look bad. As the debate over the elections continue, our team chose this on what our home County, Orange County, is planning as the Election Season gathers steam: 07/28/2020 07:33 PM PDT July 28, 2020 – In consideration of the challenges posed by COVID-19, the Registrar of Voters has released a report on what changes and procedures will be implemented for the November 3, 2020 Presidential General Election. These changes will be put in place as a result of COVID-19 so that in-person voting can be conducted safely and securely. California law requires that in-person voting be provided for the Presidential General Election. |
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