The federal government may be buying up possible coronavirus vaccines ahead of time, but buying treatments such as drugs and antibodies is a different matter, a top official said Tuesday.
Dr. Janet Woodcock, a Food and Drug Administration official who leads therapeutics development for Operation Warp Speed, said advanced purchasing of potential Covid-19 therapeutics is much different than the advanced purchase of vaccines.
“The therapeutic landscape is much wider,” Woodcock told a media briefing, adding there are multiple different modalities of therapy.
With vaccines “it's very clear what you're going to do,” Woodcock said. “The primary goal is to vaccinate people and protect them… with therapeutics it's a little more complicated.”
Woodcock said that advanced purchasing of therapeutics is going to be slower, because, “out of these vast inventories of potential candidates, we have to select the most promising ones. We can't just buy advanced purchases of 600 different agents.”
Remember: Operation Warp Speed, the federal government's Covid-19 vaccine program, has contracts to buy hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines from several different companies, including Moderna, AstraZeneca, Pfizer and others.
If any are shown to work safely to protect people against coronavirus, the advanced purchases mean the vaccines could be rolled out immediately without a wait time for their manufacture.