Potential COVID vaccine being made in Kalamazoo
There are many COVID-19 vaccine candidates being developed right now, but one is already being produced right here in Kalamazoo.
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc., along with a German company called BioNTech, just reached a $1.95 billion deal with the U.S. government to supply up to a million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of 2020.
Initial manufacturing in the U.S. is taking place at Pfizer’s plant in Portage and two other locations in the country.
Trials of two versions of the vaccine have shown promise recently. The vaccines use messenger RNA to prompt people’s immune systems to produce antibodies to fight the virus.
The company said in a statement that it expects to produce more than 1.3 billion doses of the vaccine by the end of 2021 should one of the variations prove effective.
