Pfizer plans to ship 200 million doses to the US by Might sooner than anticipated

An inoculation dish with Pfizer BioNtech vaccines.

Matthias Bein | Image Alliance | Getty Images

Pfizer plans to ship 200 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine to the US by May, earlier than originally forecast in July. This emerges from slides the drug maker released Tuesday ahead of its fourth quarter earnings call.

The company, which developed its vaccine with German drug maker BioNTech, also said it could potentially dispense 2 billion doses worldwide by the end of this year, as healthcare providers can extract an additional sixth dose of the vaccine from the vials. In December, the Food and Drug Administration announced that additional doses from vials could be used after the cans were discarded due to labeling confusion.

According to the company, Pfizer had shipped 29 million doses of its two-shot vaccine to the US government as of January 31. 17 million of these Pfizer doses had been administered by Monday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The company’s Covid-19 vaccine was the first to be approved for emergency use in the United States

Pfizer, like other coronavirus vaccine manufacturers, is struggling to meet demand for shots, which hopefully will help end the pandemic. The company recently asked French drug maker Sanofi to make 100 million doses of its vaccine.

The delivery schedule update comes a few hours after Pfizer announced it would sell approximately $ 15 billion in coronavirus vaccine doses this year. The company raised its full-year earnings guidance from $ 3.10 to $ 3.10-3.20, citing “additional improvements” to its guidance for vaccine sales.

The company also said Tuesday it would be “ready to act” if a variant of Covid shows evidence that it is resistant to its vaccine. In the past few weeks, U.S. health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, raised concerns that vaccines currently on the market may not be as effective against new, more contagious strains of the virus.

In the slides released Tuesday, Pfizer said patients “are likely to need regular boosting to maintain the immune response and counter newly emergent strains of variants.”