Moderna ditches 400,000 Covid-19 vaccine doses
Moderna Inc. had to discard 400,000 doses of its experimental Covid-19 shot after a filtration issue compromised the product during the final stages of manufacturing, a U.S. official said Thursday.
Moncef Slaoui, Operation Warp Speed’s chief scientific adviser, disclosed Moderna’s manufacturing hiccup in an interview with Bloomberg News. The 400,000 doses, which weren’t yet placed in vials, were part of a broader 1.4 million batch of its vaccine, Slaoui said.
Moderna, however, remains on track to meet its production estimates of 20 million doses this month, and 85 to 100 million doses for the U.S. in the first quarter of 2021, according to Ray Jordan, a spokesman for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company.
Moderna’s two-dose regimen employs messenger RNA technology similar to that used in the Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE vaccine authorized for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration last week. The Moderna shot was being reviewed by federal advisers on Thursday and could get its own emergency-use authorization from U.S. regulators within days.