Covid-19 Vaccines Are in High Demand, but Thousands More Workers Are Needed to Make Them - (Morningstar via NewsPoints Desk)

• Contract-manufacturing companies working to accelerate the global availability of COVID-19 vaccines are struggling with a shortage of workers to meet this year's big production push, as reported in Morningstar.

• The talent pool is so tight that Emergent BioSolutions, a COVID-19 contractor for AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, enlisted its CEO and a half-dozen other senior executives to pitch potential hires at a recent virtual career fair.

• Outsourcing companies such as Emergent produce about one-sixth of complex treatments including vaccines, but the scale and abruptness of COVID-19 shots is likely to drive up that share much higher, industry executives and experts say.

• The news source noted that with demand dwarfing supply, Pfizer, Moderna and others are turning to contract manufacturers for assistance in what is the largest pharmaceutical rollout in modern history.

• Lonza is recruiting dozens of new employees from quality-assurance managers to engineers at one of its facilities in Switzerland, which is expected to turn out 300 million doses over the next year.

• Meanwhile, Recipharm, which is helping with late-stage production, is hiring about 65 workers for a plant in France. Avid Bioservices, which has contracts to make components for multiple vaccine candidates, expects to recruit about 40 new employees by next summer, double a typical year. 

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