Baltimore Vaccine Plant's Troubles Ripple Across 3 Continents

[Ramsey Barner]

1. Para. 29: it was a Trump Administration fuckup

As The Times previously reported, the federal government last year banked on Emergent to be the main domestic manufacturer for both the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines even as evidence of serious quality problems mounted.

Though the government awarded Emergent a $163 million contract in 2012 to ready the Baltimore plant to make vaccines in response to a pandemic, the company had not met a key requirement for demonstrating large-scale manufacturing ability as a June 2020 deadline neared. That month, however, federal officials nonetheless announced a new $628 million deal, most of it to reserve manufacturing capacity at the Baltimore plant for Covid-19 vaccine.

The company’s stock price soared, and its chief executive, Robert Kramer, boasted during a virtual conference for investors in March that profitability in 2020 had been “off-the-chart successful.” In a conference call with Wall Street analysts last week, Emergent’s chief financial officer announced “significant revenue growth and corresponding profitability” for the first quarter of this year and projected record revenues for 2021, driven largely by the company’s Covid-19 vaccine manufacturing deals.

[link:https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/world/baltimore-vaccine-countries.html|