Moderna Vaccine Tracker

UPDATE JAN 27, 2021:
Moderna has not announced the U.S. release of any additional lots of its COVID-19 vaccine since our last update on Monday, Jan. 25. Moderna's U.S. vaccine delivery rate averaged 476,000 doses per day during the latter half of December, but has dropped substantially in the new year, currently averaging just 277,000 doses per day since January 1. This is a new record low rate for the company in 2021.

To put Moderna's creeping production rate in perspective: the company would need to sustain a manufacturing rate of 1.1 million doses per day in order to fulfill its commitment to deliver 100 million doses by the end of March...a goal that currently looks unachievable. At its present production rate it will take until December for the company to reach its March goal.

TECH NOTE: A LOT OF TROUBLE
Moderna's vaccine lot number 041L20A made the news last week when a cluster of 6 vaccine recipients in San Diego developed severe allergic reactions, prompting the state of California to place a temporary hold on vaccinations using that lot. Moderna and the FDA are currently investigating the issue.

From our perspective as dose-trackers, that event provided both some new information and some additional uncertainty. Our estimates of the number of US doses delivered by Moderna hinge on our assumption regarding lot sizes - how many doses of vaccine bear the same lot number. We base our estimate of that number on Moderna's own statement, on January 4, that "approximately 18 million doses have been supplied to the U.S. Government to date," plus its report of 26 lots delivered up to that time, enabling us to calculate an average of 692,000 doses delivered to the US government per lot.

Last week's news regarding lot 041L20A thus surprised us, when Moderna revealed that the lot in question comprised 1.27 million doses, of which 964,900 had been delivered to the government.

For the moment we have chosen to stick with our initial estimate of an average of 692,000 doses delivered to the government per lot, rather than the number revealed this week for lot 041L20A (965,000 doses) because the former is based on the average of 26 lots, whereas the latter is based on a single lot. We will continue to monitor information from several sources, including Moderna itself, and may adjust our lot size estimate in future, as warranted by available evidence.

WHY THE SLOWDOWN?
Moderna has not yet publicly discussed the dial-back in its U.S. manufacturing rate, so we're left to speculate. Our best guess is supply chain issues.

Previously, Moderna's vaccine was produced exclusively by contract manufacturer Lonza at its Portsmouth NH facility. But that changed this week when Lonza gained approval from Switzerland's regulatory agency, Swissmedic, to begin manufacturing at its huge Visp, Switzerland facility as well. Lonza's contract with Moderna stipulates that "In no event will LONZA or its Affiliates ship, or be instructed to ship, to the United States any Product Manufactured at any Facility outside of the United States." That means that raw materials like the specialty lipids that go into Moderna's vaccine, which may be in short supply, are now needed by two facilities, only one of which makes vaccine for the U.S. market. The data we report here reflects only U.S. production.

WHERE THE DATA COMES FROM:
Pharmaceutical companies normally treat their manufacturing data like state secrets, sharing them with the FDA only because they are required to, and even then only in strictest secrecy, out of the public eye. But these aren't normal times, and so the public has an unusual opportunity to track Moderna Therapeutics' COVID-19 vaccine production rate with unprecedented clarity.

The company's RNA-based COVID-19 vaccine, authorized by the FDA on December 20th of last year, was rushed to market long before the company knew for sure just how long the product's shelf life would be. At the time, ongoing testing had already established that its shelf life was at least 6 months, but still more testing would be required to reveal how much longer than that it might be safely stored before losing potency. That's a critical void in our knowledge for a vaccine that is America's best hope (so far) for stemming the pandemic that has already killed more than a third of a million Americans. So Moderna took the unusual step of printing no expiration dates on its vaccine vials, instead providing a page on its web site where pharmacists and other interested parties can search for a vial's lot number and learn the company's current best guess regarding its expiration date. That's helpful because the product's current six month shelf life is likely to be found in the near future to be considerably longer than that, so this web page enables the company to revise each production lot's expiration date as future data provides deeper insight.

But that same expiration look-up page also (and apparently unwittingly) reveals to the educated eye everything we need to know in order to track Moderna's vaccine manufacturing pace in real time, eliminating our dependence on the company or the federal government for answers to the critical question of how rapidly it is is cranking out the life-saving vaccine doses that will ultimately bring this deadly pandemic to an end. When you type in a vaccine lot number and click the page's 'Submit' button, Moderna's web server (housed by Amazon Web Services) replies to that query with a JSON file listing every lot of vaccine the company has released so far, along with each lot's current expiration date. Back-calculating from that expiry date, using the current 6-month shelf life figure for the vaccine, thus enables us to determine each lot's manufacturing date. And finally, we know how many doses an average lot of vaccine includes, based on the company's January 4th announcement that "approximately 18 million doses have been supplied to the U.S. Government to date." The company had produced 26 lots of vaccine in the U.S. by that date, thus allowing us to calculate that an average production lot amounts to about 692,000 doses.