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Pfizer's CEO says Jared Kushner wanted him to divert vaccine supplies from Canada, Japan, and Latin America to boost the US's COVID-19 jab stockpile
Albert Bourla said Kushner thought the US should come first and said the government could "take measures" to enforce its will and get COVID-19 shots.
www.businessinsider.com
Bourla said he and Kushner, who in the early days of the pandemic was the head of a COVID-19 shadow task force, disagreed over the timeline to supply the additional 100 million doses of Pfizer's vaccine that the Trump administration had ordered. Bourla wrote that the conflict arose because the US was topping up on its original order of 100 million doses, but other countries had already signed contracts with Pfizer to secure their vaccine doses.
"Jared was asking for a very aggressive delivery plan to the U.S. for the additional 100 million doses. He wanted it all in the second quarter of 2021," Bourla wrote. "To do that, we would have had to take supplies from Canada, Japan, and Latin American countries, all of which had placed their orders earlier than the U.S. and were expecting the vaccine in the second quarter."
...
The CEO said the disagreement ended when Pfizer's manufacturing team told him its schedule would allow it to deliver the extra doses to the US without cutting the supply to other countries.
"Jared called me two days later from Mar-a-Lago to thank me for the collaboration, and we closed the loop on a happy note," Bourla wrote.
The US and Pfizer struck a $2 billion deal for the additional 100 million vaccine doses — enough to fully inoculate 50 million Americans — in December 2020.
The headline/article are leading, and I'm sure there are those who won't give Kushner credit for anything. I also wouldn't advocate 'taking supplies' from other countries. But it sounds like in this case, leaning hard on Pfizer got the results we needed. Pfizer got with it's manufacturing team and found a way to make this happen - and getting the US enough vaccine to vaccinate another 50 million people by Q2 2021