Not as much as i would have liked sadly.
Firstly apologies for my embarrassingly poor levels of keyboard skills that prevents me from linking said articles. I'm actually having problems locating the article on Pfizer I saw a week ago. It was from a European media site and it was commenting on how Pfizer was able to ramp up vaccine production following the revamping of it's Belgian plant. It said that they would be able to supply 100m doses to the EU in March and again for April and May. I now cannot find this article, which is probably because it has been taken down because it was factually incorrect. All other articles I'm seeing are saying that Pfizer will be upping supply to the EU to 200m doses for Q2. The original article I saw was quoting the source as Pfizer itself, and maybe they were confused and it was actually Pfizer's total output that was 100m doses per month, not what was being supplied to the EU.
Anyway the outcome, you'll be pleased to know, is that I will need to scale down my estimations on EU vaccine production. So say 65m per month doses will come from Pfizer for EU consumption. We know from VDLs own comments last week that the EU had exported 40m doses over the previous 6 week period, so say that's an extra 25m doses per month. Plus it's also been widely reported that the EU will receive around 30m doses of the AZ vaccine by the end of March, so that's an additional 10m per month. So I make that the EU is producing around 100m per month rather than the 120m doses I stated in my last post.
I know you've said before that you don't want to speculate on numbers of doses, but at the moment when there's only 2 companies producing at the moment, it's very easy to piece it together from the official information that's out there.
As regards the US production, I found an other article from the Wall Street Journal dated yesterday. It says that from the 3 main producers, Pfizer, Moderna and J&J combined, they expected March production to be ramped up to 132m doses, up from 48m in February, and quoted somebody called Evercore ISI as the source.
As regards the UK, I've given quite a big range here of 5m-10m as this is more difficult to gauge accurately. We know that up until a couple of weeks ago we'd given out 11m AZ jabs and you yourself pointed out that at least some of these had been imported from the EU. That figure is now probably around 15m. Given that we know there's going to be a shortage of doses available in April, and we're expecting to have to seriously scale down first doses for a month, it's fair to say that there's an AZ supply issue. So the absolute maximum of AZ doses provided up until the end of March would be around 30m, and the actual figure likely to be closer to 20m I suspect, of which an unknown number has been imported from EU. So somewhere between 5m and 10m a month seems reasonable to me.
