President Trump announced the deal during a media briefing on Tuesday.
Moderna is one of several companies producing the vaccine “at risk”, as the sector calls it, which means that the company is currently producing the vaccine before it is approved. Clinical trials are currently underway to test whether it is safe and effective.
Under this contract, worth up to $ 1.525 billion for 100 million doses, the doses would be owned by the US government and would be distributed and used as part of its Covid-19 vaccine campaign. If the doses were used, they would be delivered free of charge to Americans. The government could also receive up to 400 million doses of this vaccine, HHS said.
The vaccine, called mRNA-1273, was developed by Moderna in collaboration with the US government. It was assisted in development by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the U.S. Biomedical Advance Research and Development Authority, known as BARDA, supported late-stage clinical trials and helped scale production. Moderna’s advanced stage clinical trial, which began on July 27, is the first Phase 3 clinical trial for Phase 3 for a Covid-19 vaccine in the United States.
This contract is part of the US Government’s Operation Warp Speed, the federal pressure to get vaccines and therapeutics to market safely as soon as possible. HHS said the goal is to get effective faxes to the American people by the end of the year.
The government also reached an agreement with Pfizer in July to produce 100 million doses of its vaccine. In August, it reached a similar deal for 100 million doses with Janssen, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine arm, for its vaccine candidate. It has other deals with GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Pasteur, Novavax and AstraZeneca.
There are 28 Covid-19 vaccines in human trials, according to the World Health Organization.
“By creating a vaccine portfolio for Operation Warp Speed, the Trump Administration increases the chances that the United States will have at least one safe, effective vaccine by 2021,” HHS Secretary Alex Azar said in Tuesday’s news release. “The current investment represents the next step in supporting this vaccine candidate far from the early development by Moderna and the National Institutions of Health, through clinical trials, and now large-scale production, with the potential to deliver hundreds of millions of safe and effective doses. for the American people. “
