Several of the companies, including AstraZeneca, Moderna and Pfizer, have published promising results from the first human trials of their candidate vaccines. Of the five companies represented in the hearing, all but Pfizer have received between hundreds of millions and more than one billion in funds from the United States government for their experimental injections of coronavirus.
All the executives of the pharmaceutical company. He said they would depend on the U.S. government to assign and distribute the vaccines, although Macaya Douoguih of Janssen said the company also has a framework for high-priority individuals based on risk. The responses did not appear to satisfy several Democrats.
“Of the five companies that are investing most of the resources … one of you has a plan, you all depend on a government that was unable to obtain the proper PPE for large areas of this population,” said Representative Joe Kennedy (D -Mass.). “You are saying that you are trusting the federal government, clearly the federal government has failed here several times.”
But Gerberding said the agency has a “very special responsibility” to assign vaccines across the country.
He also backed the idea of asking the independent, nonpartisan National Academy of Medicine to develop a framework for ethical distribution, something Trump administration officials suggested at a Senate AID hearing earlier this month.
Hours after the hearing began, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine said they would develop the framework at the request of the National Institutes of Health and the CDC.
The combination of knowledge from CDC and academia “could really help judge those decisions independently of the administration,” said Gerberding.
Pfizer Chief Commercial Officer John Young also cited an existing CDC framework for distributing vaccines to at-risk populations, such as the elderly and infirm. “We believe that the CDC has established very clear criteria,” he said.
