LIVE: Biden Meets With CEOs of J&J and Merck on Covid Vaccine Partnership

(Mar. 10) Watch live as President Joe Biden meets with the heads of Johnson & Johnson and Merck to discuss their partnership to produce Covid-19 vaccines on Wednesday, March 10, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

It was Valentine’s Day, and top Biden administration officials were concerned that Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine was behind schedule.

In a phone call that Sunday between J&J Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Alex Gorsky and Biden’s Covid-19 response coordinator, Jeff Zients, and science adviser David Kessler, Kessler implored Gorsky to ramp up production of the company’s shot.

He drew a comparison with Robert Wood Johnson, son of one of the company’s founders, who became known as “General” Johnson after leading a World War II effort to involve small businesses in the production of wartime supplies.

This, too, is a wartime effort, Kessler told Gorsky, and the status quo isn’t enough. Scheduled to last 15 minutes, the call extended to 90, according to people familiar with the matter. Afterward, J&J’s executive vice president, Kathy Wengel, called the Biden team back and said the company was on board, the people said.

The push from the president’s advisers reinvigorated simmering talks that led to a tie-up between the company and its competitor Merck & Co., which also struck a separate deal with the U.S. government to help it speed up J&J’s production.

Biden will also announce Wednesday that he will buy another 100 million doses from J&J, doubling the country’s order in a deal that will be finalized in the coming weeks, officials familiar with the move said. The U.S. is stockpiling surplus doses amid concerns about variants, which could lead to the need for booster shots, and uncertainty about which shots are best for kids, one of the officials said.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday will celebrate the Merck and J&J partnership, which he has said his administration brokered to accelerate manufacturing of J&J’s shot, the third vaccine the U.S. has authorized to prevent Covid-19. Biden has described the deal as one of several accomplishments that will lead to the U.S. having enough vaccines for every American adult by the end of May, two months earlier than he’d previously predicted.

But the companies say the deal won’t contribute significantly to J&J’s production until later in the year, leaving unclear how the U.S. will benefit. Spokespeople for the White House, Merck and J&J all declined to comment.

The Feb. 14 call between Biden’s lieutenants and Gorsky came at a time when the new administration was still learning the extent and shortcomings of the vaccination program created under President Donald Trump. Zients and Kessler were in charge of vastly accelerating the pace of shots.

Talks between Merck and J&J had begun before Biden was inaugurated. Merck’s Jan. 25 announcement that it would abandon its own vaccine candidates led to an acceleration of the discussions with J&J, which had what was expected to be a successful vaccine -- but also manufacturing bottlenecks that alarmed Biden administration officials.

In the weeks that followed, the chief executives of the two companies, who are longtime friends, hammered out an agreement under which Merck will help produce and package J&J’s vaccine.

The president will appear at the White House Wednesday with Gorsky and Merck chairman and CEO Ken Frazier to celebrate their partnership. Biden risks overstating his administration’s role in the agreement between the companies -- similar to the White House’s effort to downplay the Trump administration’s significant role laying groundwork for a U.S. vaccination campaign that is becoming the envy of the world.

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