Blunting an Alien Invasion using Expertise
This post continues the story from our last post about how an industry incumbent, Pfizer, fought back against an Alien Invader, Moderna. The first post covered how Pfizer used its expertise to outmaneuver and outperform the Alien, even though the Alien had a possible breakthrough technology and substantial financial backing.
Moderna pioneered a new and much faster way of creating vaccines. Pfizer managed to hold on to its profit and increase its vaccine sales in the competition resulting from the COVID epidemic. In phase two, Pfizer continues to thrive by leveraging their Pharma expertise.
On the second generation of Covid boosters and vaccines now approved EUA for children 5-11:
1) Pfizer got rapid FDA and CDC approvals with high quality clinical data and data directly addressing high risk populations and possible adverse effects.
2) Pfizer changed formulations for childrens’ doses easing distribution of jabs.
3) Pfizer research trials reduced drug substance required per child’s vaccination (10 mcg) avoiding possible supply issues due to high child-vaccine demand
For newer and existing vaccines Pfizer continued improvements in manufacturing and marketing:
4) The production time for vaccines dropped from 110 days to 60 thereby producing more vaccine doses over the same capital plant.
5) Pfizer could flexibly deal with governments and regulators to meet evolving needs (three tier pricing for developed, developing, and poor countries – priced at about the cost of a meal out in developed countries, developing countries, and non-profit for poor countries)
6) Pfizer used inhouse and contract (CDMO) firms to balance out production requirements. As volume climbed Pfizer gain ‘competitors’ capacity in key areas such as “fill and finish”.
In our next post, we’ll discuss what happened to the rest of the industry and summarize the counter measures (expertise) worked against the alien, Moderna.
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