Another incompetent Trump administration failure: Vaccine shortages!

 U.S. could face months of vaccine shortages amid global competition. Published in Politico written by Sarah Owermohle

The United States has reserved roughly 800 million doses from six manufacturers, but it’s not yet clear whether all of their vaccines will prove safe and effective enough to use. | Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post via AP

Most Americans’ best hope of getting a shot by spring or early summer may rest on vaccines that have not yet been proven to work.

The United States could be heading for a vaccine cliff this spring, with shortages forcing hundreds of millions of Americans to wait for shots amid intense global competition for limited doses.

Incredulous but true, the (failed!) Trump administration has bought 100 million doses each of vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, but the U.S. is unlikely to get additional doses anytime soon because of strong international demand. And both vaccines require two doses per person, effectively halving the already scarce supply.

Trump administration officials insisted Tuesday that most American adults can be vaccinated by May. But despite Donald Trump’s attempt to compel vaccine sales to the U.S. by executive order, most Americans’ best hope of getting a shot by spring or early summer may rest on vaccines that have not yet been proven to work — such as the doses being developed by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca.

“We’re clearly not going to get there” with the Moderna and Pfizer shots, said Peter Hotez, a virologist and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, who is working on a vaccine candidate with partners in India. “We’re going to need four or five different vaccines.”

The United States has reserved roughly 800 million doses from six manufacturers — including 100 million each from Pfizer and Moderna — but it’s not yet clear whether all of their vaccines will prove safe and effective enough to use. And the two frontrunners have inked deals with multiple countries that are stretching thin their early supplies.

The Trump administration is not alone in assuming that all of its big vaccine bets will pay off. Several other countries’ estimates “are based on a best-case scenario,” said Krishna Udayakumar, founding director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, whose team has tracked global vaccine purchases.

Those best-case scenarios generally involve manufacturers proving their vaccines are safe and effective, and then quickly scaling up production to make hundreds of millions of doses. They also make assumptions about which countries or organizations — such as the United States, or the COVAX Facility, an international public-private partnership aimed at providing vaccines to low-income countries — actually get the supplies early on.

Reports this week that the U.S. government turned down opportunities to buy up to 400 million more Pfizer shots have raised fresh questions about how the country will secure its supply. Senior administration officials denied those reports at a Monday Operation Warp Speed briefing and said negotiations are ongoing. But former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, now on Pfizer’s board, said Tuesday the firm offered more supply multiple times and the government rejection was recent.