WASHINGTON – President Biden on Monday canceled a visit to a coronavirus vaccine plant operated by Emergency Bio Solutions after publishing a lengthy investigation into how the company increased its influence over the president’s emergency medical reserve.
Instead of visiting the emergency facility in Baltimore on Wednesday, the president will convene a meeting at the White House with pharmaceutical giants Merck & Co. and Johnson and Johnson officials to attend the session in Baltimore, White House officials said. Merck and Emergent are partnering separately with Johnson and Johnson to create the company’s coronavirus vaccine.
“We felt the meeting was a more appropriate place,” White House press secretary Jane Psaki told reporters.
Emergent has more than 600 million in contracts with the federal government to expand the “fill-and-finish” capacity to prepare coronavirus vaccines and complete the process of vaccination and therapeutic procedures. Merck and Johnson and Johnson’s officials will attend a White House session on Wednesday, a senior administration official said.
An emergency spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. Spokeswoman Nina DiLorenzo previously defended the company’s business dealings with the government in a written reply to a question, saying: Ready. ”
The Times investigation focused on the Emergency Reserve, Strategic National Stockpile, which became notorious during the coronavirus epidemic for its lack of critical supplies such as N95 masks and other personal protective equipment.
Decisions on how to spend the limited budget of the repository are believed to be based on a careful assessment of life-saving measures by government officials, but the Times has found that they are driven by the demands and financial interests of a large number of biotech companies. Specialties in products that take into account terrorist risks rather than infectious diseases.
The main one of them is Emergency. The Times has found that for most of the past decade, the government has spent half of StockPail’s-half-billion annual budget on emergency anthrax vaccines.
In the race for funding, products for epidemic preparedness – including the N95 – were frequently lost, according to the Times investigation, which relied on more than 40,000 pages of documents and interviews with more than 60 people with information inside Stockpile.
This Image The fact that some health care workers wear rubbish bags for personal safety has become a lasting symbol of the government’s failed response. Yet the government paid મર 626 million to Emergency in 2020 for products that contained vaccines to prevent terrorist attacks using anthrax.
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For much of Emergent’s two-decade history, its primary product has been the anthrax vaccine, first licensed in 1970, purchased by the company in 1998 from the state of Michigan. Over time, the price per dose that the government agreed to pay for the emergency rose almost sixfold in terms of inflation.
Ms. DeLorenzo had previously justified the company’s pricing. “You can’t protect people from Antirex for less than the price of a lat,” he wrote in an email.
The government also included a new anthrax vaccine in Emergent’s sale in 2020 that has not yet been approved as safe and requires special approval to stockpile. In the months leading up to the coronavirus epidemic, the Trump administration paid the company nearly billion 3 billion in long-term contracts; Last year, the government agreed to pay the company more than million 600 million to make coronavirus vaccines from other companies at its facility in Baltimore. Emergent is now preparing a coronavirus vaccine for AstraZeneca as well as Johnson and Johnson.
Emergent, whose board is filled with former federal officials, has more specifically adjusted the lobbying budgets of some large pharmaceutical companies, the Times reported. He sometimes resorted to underdeveloped tactics in Washington and Washington. Efforts to develop an excellent and inexpensive anthrax vaccine, for example, broke after Emergent showed its competitors, documents and interviews.
Ms. DeLorenzo described the company’s lobbying as “education-focused” and “appropriate and necessary.”
