The United States Officially Has Enough COVID Vaccine
There was a lot of concern in late 2020 that the United States might not have enough COVID-19 vaccine doses to vaccinate the population in 2021. Considering the vaccine had been brought to market at an unprecedented speed, and the vaccines have had to fight through unnecessary delays from the US Food and Drug Administration, you could understand why the idea of low volumes of vaccine might exist.
But for a long time, the makers of these vaccines, including Pfizer and Moderna, have been indicating that they would be able to scale up manufacturing quickly once approved. However, like we said above, the FDA kept delaying those approvals.
Now that Pfizer and Moderna have been able to rollout that vaccines after the FDA's delays, they've been able to scale up to numbers that some didn't believe they could reach. For example, Pfizer has announced they will be providing 13 million COVID vaccine doses PER WEEK, by mid-March. That's enough vaccine to complete over 6 million COVID treatments per week, and more than 26 million per month. But that's just Pfizer.
Moderna has also increased their production capabilities, and Johnson & Johnson is set to push their vaccine out as soon as approval is given. However Johnson & Johnson has been dealt the longest unneeded delay from the FDA, having to wait nearly a month before the FDA would even consider their vaccine. Leading to countless deaths that could have been prevented if the FDA would have worked harder to approve the vaccine.
Even with the delay, Johnson & Johnson says they can have 20 million single-shot vaccines ready within their first month of approval, and can have 100 million doses shipped within months after approval.
With all of the totals from these three drug makers, there will be more than 700 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine available in the United States by summer. That's more than enough to vaccinate ALL AMERICANS, including children, who can't get the vaccine yet, and may not need the vaccine at all.