Kalamazoo Times

Pfizer is reconsidering its initial plan to expand in the United States due to possible drug pricing orders, Yahoo! Finance reported.

Chief Executive Albert Bourla said that Pfizer might rethink its plans if President Donald Trump's executive order is implemented tying prices Medicare patients pay for prescriptions to prices other countries pay, the news media reported.

"These new executive orders could force us to rethink those plans, consider job reductions and add to the economic and health anxiety already widely felt in our country," Bourla said on the company's earnings conference call, Yahoo reported.

Trump signed the executive order in July intending to lower prices American pay for prescriptions.

Pfizer has ramped up its manufacturing site in Kalamazoo lately in preparation for mass-producing a COVID-19 vaccine for human trials at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the University of Rochester Medical Center/Rochester Regional Health and New York University's Grossman School of Medicine, the Detroit Free Press reported.

The news media reported that the coronavirus vaccine uses a small amount of the virus' RNA to fool the body into making proteins that amount to stimulating an immune response to protect those exposed to the virus.

Dr. Kirsten Lyke with the University of Maryland School of Medicine's Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health told the Free Press that four variations of the vaccine exist, each manipulated slightly with different dosing levels.

If the vaccine is proven to work, Pfizer has said it would manufacture it at three plants: Kalamazoo, St. Louis and Andover, Mass, the news agency reported.

"I have no doubt that we will solve this and there will be a vaccine," Chaz Calitiri, Pfizer's vice president of operations for sterile injectables and the interim site lead for the Kalamazoo plant told the news agency. "We've got to do this in an accelerated timeline. Normally, it takes four to five years to get something like this to market. So, you know, the fact that it's been just several months, and people are talking about potentially having a solution this year, is pretty astonishing."

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