Covid-19 Vaccines Are In High Demand, But Thousands More Workers Are Needed To Make Them done

Covid-19 Vaccines

SEOUL—Contract-manufacturing companies working to accelerate the global availability of Covid-19 vaccines are struggling with a shortage of their own: There aren’t enough workers to meet this year’s big production push. The talent pool is so tight that Emergent BioSolutions Inc., EBS 3.63% a Covid-19 contractor based in Gaithersburg, Md., for AstraZeneca AZN 0.35% PLC and Johnson & Johnson, JNJ -1.82% enlisted its CEO and a half-dozen other senior executives to pitch potential hires at a virtual career fair in October. More than 550 people attended. Not enough of them were swayed. More than two months later, Emergent still has roughly 200 openings for warehouse associates, quality-assurance analysts and even a supply-chain management director. “Hiring and ramping up has become challenging,” said Sean Kirk, an Emergent executive vice president, who spoke at the event. Outsourcing companies such as Emergent make about one-sixth of complex treatments including vaccines, but the scale and abruptness of Covid-19 shots is likely to boost that share much higher, say industry executives and experts. With demand dwarfing supply, Pfizer Inc., PFE -1.27% Moderna Inc. MRNA 6.12% and others are turning to contract manufacturers for assistance in what is the largest pharmaceutical rollout in modern history. Manufacturing Medicine Amid unprecedented demand for Covid-19 vaccines, drug developers are leaning more on contract manufacturers to satisfy orders worldwide. Biologic drugs (including vaccines) manufacturing by source, 2019 In-house or via partnerships For overall FDA-approved drugs Publicly known contract manufacturing agreements for drug manufacturing But those helping drugmakers need more help themselves. More than 5,000 open jobs exist at the world’s 10 largest companies that have won Covid-19 outsourcing work, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the companies’ websites. The firms were ranked by production capacity. The labor crunch is another potential drag on a global vaccine rollout already facing a supply backlog and requiring near-flawless logistics. Many contract manufacturers are trying to fill roles that often require years of experience in pharmaceutical manufacturing or biotechnology-related degrees. They are also struggling to hire workers willing to work overnight shifts, as production goes round-the-clock. The jobs are likely to be permanent. “We are truly in unprecedented territory because of the world-wide demand outstripping supply,” said Rena Conti, a Boston University business professor who studies biopharmaceutical supply chains. Many contract manufacturers were already staffing up before the pandemic. Demand has soared for niche production of complex medications treating diseases such as breast cancer or rheumatoid arthritis, taken by a minority of the population. But Covid-19 vaccines have created a massive new product category where the potential market is every person on Earth. “I’m hard pressed to think of another event where we saw such rapid expansion,” said Gil Roth, president of the Pharma & Biopharma Outsourcing Association, which represents contract manufacturers in the U.S. And Europe. Related Video As drugmakers distribute Covid-19 vaccines, cybersecurity experts are warning against the growing threat of tampering and theft by organized crime networks. WSJ explains how hackers are targeting the vaccine rollout during the pandemic. Illustration: George Downs World production of Covid-19 vaccines is expected to reach 6 billion doses in 2021, according to industry tracker PharmSource. Nearly every major pharmaceutical company with a potential vaccine candidate has enlisted contract manufacturers to help meet production targets. BioNTech SE, BNTX 6.04% which developed with Pfizer one of the vaccines being distributed in the West, has several publicly known deals with contract manufacturers in Europe. Moderna, which developed another vaccine used by Western countries, also has tapped several contractors, including Lonza Group AG LONN -0.49% , a biopharmaceutical manufacturing giant that produces the vaccine’s key ingredient. Catalent Inc., CTLT -0.41% one of the largest contract manufacturers in the U.S., has leaned into unusual recruiting strategies, including ads on the radio-streaming app, Pandora, targeting people who live near its manufacturing plants. It offers $3,000 sign-on bonuses for its manufacturing associates willing to work overnight shifts at its Madison, Wis., facility. The company, based in Somerset, N.J., has hundreds of unfilled jobs, which could directly affect how much extra production it can allot to Covid-19 vaccines, said Bernie Clark, Catalent’s vice president of marketing and strategy. The company has signed multiple Covid-19 vaccine contracts, including deals to produce compounds for Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.

 

More than 5,000 open jobs exist at the world’s 10 largest companies that have won Covid-19 vaccine outsourcing work, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Photo: vincenzo pinto/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images “To keep adding capacity and new lines, you have to have the people to run them,” Mr. Clark said. Lonza, the Swiss contractor, is recruiting dozens of new employees from quality-assurance managers to engineers at one of its facilities in Switzerland, which is expected to turn out 300 million doses over the next year. Sweden’s Recipharm RECI.B -0.36% AB, another Moderna contractor helping with late-stage production, is hiring about 65 workers for a plant in France, the company said. Avid Bioservices Inc., CDMO 3.38% of Tustin, Calif., which has contracts to make components for multiple vaccine candidates, expects to recruit about 40 new employees by next summer—or double a typical year, said Lorna Larson, the company’s senior director in human resources. Those workers require six months of training, detailing how Avid handles manufacturing and assists clients. The plan is to keep the new hires long-term, incorporating them into Avid’s staff of 234 employees, Ms. Larson said. “The pandemic has just accelerated the fight for talent,” she said. “It really is critical right now—and there’s a lot of competition for it.

Covid-19 Worlwide

France’s Vaunted Health System Fails Its Greatest Test In Generations: The COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout © Provided by Fortune For decades, France has boasted how its first-rate public health system—for which the French pay heavily in taxes—amply cares for its 67 million people, from birth to the end of life. And Louis Pasteur, the Frenchman who invented the world’s first vaccine in the 1880s, is nationally revered, with streets and a renowned research institute named after him. Yet in recent days, France’s failure to organize any credible COVID-19 vaccine program has exposed deep flaws in both its health and political systems—ones that could prolong the pandemic, cause thousands of unnecessary deaths, and threaten the reelection chances of President Emmanuel Macron in just over a year. Consider the evidence: Less than two weeks after coronavirus vaccine campaigns began rolling out across the world, about 4.2 million Americans and about 4.5 million Chinese have so far been vaccinated. A full quarter of Israel’s population has already been vaccinated. Britain, with the same population as France, has vaccinated more than 944,000 people. And Germany has jabbed the arms of about 239,000 people, out of a population of 83 million. Now take France: As of Monday morning, 515 people in the country had received their first shot of the two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine; that figure is not missing any digits. Under mounting pressure to explain his performance, French Health Minister Olivier Véran said late afternoon Monday that “several thousand people” were immunized during the day. Still, that vague figure lags drastically far behind other rich countries—and for several reasons. In a decision for which the government is now paying a high price, officials decided months ago that it would administer the COVID-19 vaccinations only by the country’s 60,000 or so general practitioners. That is unlike the yearly flu shot, for example, which is given at thousands of neighborhood pharmacies, or by regular nurses. Coronavirus vaccines are not mandatory, far different from 11 diseases like mumps and measles, which are obligatory for children to attend school. “There is a very, very cautious approach not to oblige people to get vaccinated,” says Emmanuel Rivière, director general in France of the polling agency Kantar Public. Behind the government’s reasoning is the deep reluctance among millions of French to accept the COVID-19 vaccine, partly reflecting a general distrust of government, as well as a distrust of profit-making Big Pharma. Vaccine suspicions About four in 10 French are highly reluctant to be vaccinated against the coronavirus—a far higher proportion than almost any Western country, according to an IPSOS poll of attitudes across several countries. Kantar found in November that the widespread skepticism stems partly from a deep distrust of government, as well as the lightning speed at which the coronavirus vaccine was developed. “People will accept their kids getting shots for diseases,” Rivière says. “But they say it takes at least 10 years to develop a vaccine.” The COVID-19 vaccine rollout has shaved years off the process thanks in part to an unprecedented global collaboration between drugmakers and researchers, plus the adoption of new innovative drug development techniques. It helps of course that regulators are under tremendous pressure to review and approve the clinical trial data as soon as possible. Nonetheless, doubts linger in France. And faced with that reality, French officials have opted to tread carefully—so carefully, in fact, that the vaccine campaign virtually stalled at launch. One problem, for example, is a government rule requiring each person to consult a doctor before being vaccinated against COVID-19, to discuss possible health risks, and then to sign a written consent form. Those measures have helped slow down the effort to roll out mass vaccinations in senior-citizen nursing homes, which has seen large numbers of COVID-19 deaths. Many residents deemed to be unable to make independent choices require consent from relatives. To many, the rules seem to be absurd regulatory overreach. France has had a higher COVID-19 death rate than the U.S.: More than 65,000 French have died of the virus, among a population that is one-fifth the U.S. Some believe the slow vaccine rollout might cause needless deaths. “There are large costs in this delay in terms of lives lost,” says French economist Antoine Lévy, who estimates that the government, by not investing heavily in mass vaccinations, might pay a far higher economic price, if it fails to end its virus spread. “We have been forced to endure a lot of constraints with the lockdowns, and the government has had to be authoritarian,” he says. “But it also has to be efficient.” Previous stumbles The lack of efficiency has highlighted far broader problems with France’s vaunted health care, which operates on a centralized, top-down structure. Those problems arose early in the pandemic, and have greatly complicated the vaccine rollout. As the COVID-19 crisis emerged last February, French officials—including Macron—told the country that facial masks would made little difference in containing the virus. It later emerged that France had virtually no national stockpile of masks. Similarly, officials insisted that only those with active COVID-19 symptoms needed to be tested. In reality, the country had a dramatic shortage of tests, until well into April. “People got the impression that the government simply invented reality,” says Marie-Estelle Dupont, a Paris psychologist and author on issues related to French attitudes. “There was a lot of confusion about masks, and then tests. Now people do not trust the government anymore.” Winning back that trust will take major effort—but would be crucial in stemming the pandemic. In a major article in “Le Figaro” newspaper last Friday, Lévy, the economist, suggested the government scrap the pre-vaccination consent rules and allow all health professionals, including Army medics, to immunize people en masse. The article, which he says simply collated other people’s ideas, has attracted intense commentary on TV networks and among government officials. That has amazed Lévy. “It’s very worrying that these ideas seem to be novel among the French public,” he says, “We should have been debating this back in April. We are in Kafka territory here.” More health care and Big Pharma coverage from Fortune: This story was originally featured on Fortune.Com

Covid-19

UK To Move To Highest Coronavirus Alert Level As Full Lockdowns Loom © Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA Boris Johnson has his temperature taken during a visit to Chase Farm hospital in north London on Monday. The government is expected to announce new steps to control the spread of coronavirus, as the chief medical officers recommended that the UK move to the highest coronavirus alert level. Boris Johnson is due to make a TV address on Monday evening where he is set to announce mass school closures and tight lockdown restrictions. MPs will be recalled to parliament from Wednesday. A government source said the chief medical officers had recommended a move to alert level 5, meaning there is a “material risk of healthcare services being overwhelmed” and necessitating extremely strict social distancing. It was previously at 4 across the UK. The recommendation, which comes from the Joint Biosecurity Centre, has met with the agreement of the CMOs of the four UK nations. The news came amid soaring infection numbers and hospital admissions, many linked to a new, more easily transmissible variant of the virus. A Downing Street spokesman said: “The spread of the new variant of Covid-19 has led to rapidly escalating case numbers across the country. The prime minister is clear that further steps must now be taken to arrest this rise and to protect the NHS and save lives. He will set those out this evening.” © Thomson Reuters A man cycles past a mural on the boarded up window of a closed pizza restaurant amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Manchester, Britain, January 4, 2021. REUTERS/Phil Noble Johnson was to update the country on the next steps at 8pm on Monday. The Commons, which had been put into an extended Christmas recess until next week, will return on Wednesday. Speaking to reporters earlier on Monday, the prime minister said there was “no question” England would need tough rules, but gave no timetable. Video: Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine unlikely to hit European shores in January (Sky News Australia) Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine unlikely to hit European shores in January SHARE SHARE TWEET SHARE EMAIL Click to expand UP NEXT It remains unclear what fresh measures could be introduced, but one option was expected to be moving areas under tier 3 rules into tier 4. The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, said a national lockdown “in the spirit of March” was needed, with schools closed. He said the government also needed to spell out clearly its plan to defeat the virus through vaccination with a goal of 4m vaccines a week by February. “The virus is out of control. The tier system clearly isn’t working and we all know tougher measures are necessary,” he said. “If we are asking the British people to be subject to tough national restrictions – and we are, because that needs to happen straight away – then the contract needs to be that the vaccine programme is rolled out as quickly as possible, 2m a week in January and double that in February. That needs to be the deal. “It needs to be back to the spirit of March. Now you see lots of people out and about, trains that are half full. We need very strong messaging about staying at home.” Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, who chairs the Commons health committee, had urged immediate action, saying moves to close schools and ban all household mixing must happen “right away”. “I know all these things will be under consideration with decisions potentially imminent,” Hunt tweeted. “My point is, in the face of exponential growth, even waiting an extra day causes many avoidable deaths, so these plans must now be urgently accelerated.” The new measures would need to be in place for only about 12 weeks until enough people had been vaccinated against coronavirus, Hunt said, adding: “So there is light at the end of the tunnel.” He wrote: “To those arguing winter is always like this in the NHS: you are wrong. I faced four serious winter crises as health sec and the situation now is off-the-scale worse than any of those. “It’s true that we often had to cancel elective care in Jan to protect emergency care, but that too is under severe pressure, with record trolley waits for the very sickest patients. Even more worryingly, fewer heart attack patients appear to be presenting in ICUs, perhaps because they are not dialing 999 when they need to.” An inundated NHS could also mean more potentially avoidable cancer deaths as people stayed away from hospitals and GPs, Hunt said: “The No 1 lesson is countries that act early and decisively save lives and get their economies back to normal faster. “We, therefore, cannot afford to wait: all schools should be closed, international travel stopped, household mixing limited and the tier system reviewed so that the highest tier really does bring down infection levels (as with the first lockdown).” It was, Hunt added, “our moral duty” to ensure that frontline NHS staff were the first to receive the Covid vaccines. Stay alert to stop coronavirus spreading - here is the latest government guidance. If you think you have the virus, don't go to the GP or hospital, stay indoors and get advice online. Only call NHS 111 if you cannot cope with your symptoms at home; your condition gets worse, or your symptoms do not get better after seven days. In parts of Wales where 111 isn't available, call NHS Direct on 0845 46 47. In Scotland, anyone with symptoms is advised to self-isolate for seven days. In Northern Ireland, call your GP.

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