It doesn’t sound like Pfizer was too keen on being called part of Operation Warp Speed, but they probably caved to Trump to get the order.
The
BioNtech project to develop a novel mRNA technology for a COVID-19 vaccine was called "Project Lightspeed", which started in mid-January 2020 at BioNTech's laboratories in
Mainz, Germany, just days after the
SARS-Cov-2 genetic sequence was first made public.
[51]In September 2020, BioNTech received €375 million (US$445 million) from the
government of Germany to accelerate the development and production capacity of the
Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
[52]
Pfizer CEO
Albert Bourla said that the company decided against taking Warp Speed funding for the development of the vaccine out of a desire "to liberate our scientists [from] any bureaucracy that comes with having to give reports and agree how we are going to spend the money in parallel or together".
On July 22, Operation Warp Speed placed an advance-purchase order of $2 billion with Pfizer to manufacture 100 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine for use in the United States when the vaccine was shown to be safe, effective, licensed, and authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
[54][55][56] Because it is a two-dose vaccine, this would be enough to vaccinate fifty million Americans. (Pfizer contracted to sell twice that amount of vaccine to the European Union.)
[57] On November 9, the
Pfizer-
BioNTech partnership announced positive early results from its Phase III trial of the
BNT162b2 vaccine candidate, and on December 11, the FDA provided
emergency use authorization, initiating the distribution of the vaccine.
[58]
Pfizer initially said it was not a participant in Operation Warp Speed because it did not accept taxpayer funds for research and development, but the White House said the government's advance-order purchase for a hundred million doses of vaccine made Pfizer a participant.
[59] Company representatives said in November that "the company is part of Operation Warp Speed as a supplier of a potential coronavirus vaccine,"
[60] and that "Pfizer is proud to be one of various vaccine manufacturers participating in Operation Warp Speed as a supplier of a potential COVID-19 vaccine."
[61]A spokesperson for Pfizer, however, clarified that they had "not taken federal money for R&D",
[62] but rather its partner, BioNTech, had received substantial funding for accelerated vaccine development and manufacturing from the German government.