Is the U.S. Buying Too Many COVID Vaccine Doses?

The U.S. government began securing supply deals with COVID-19 vaccine makers in 2020. It's still buying more vaccines this year, with the total doses ordered more than enough to vaccinate every American. In this Motley Fool Live video recorded on June 23, 2021, Motley Fool contributors Keith Speights and Brian Orelli discuss whether or not the U.S. is buying too many COVID vaccine doses.

Keith Speights: Last week, the U.S. government signed a deal with Moderna (MRNA 0.89%), ticker there is MRNA. They signed this new deal to buy another 200 million doses of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine. Now that brings the total that the U.S. has ordered from Moderna to 500 million.

Now, you can add another 300 million doses for the Pfizer (PFE -0.19%) BioNTech (BNTX -0.45%) vaccine, so with just the deals that the U.S. government has made with Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna, the government has committed to purchasing 800 million doses.

That's more than enough to fully vaccinate every American regardless of age, and we haven't even included supply deals with Johnson & Johnson (JNJ -0.69%), with Novavax (NVAX -0.95%), with AstraZeneca (AZN 0.49%). Is the United States buying too many COVID-19 vaccine doses?

Brian Orelli: Maybe, probably. I mean, clearly there's going to be a lot of people who aren't going to get the vaccine so we won't need that many vaccines the first time through, but these doses could also be used as booster shots.

The new ones will be delivered in the fourth quarter of this year and the first quarter of next year and that's about the same time as when the first people started getting vaccinated so they'll be lapping their annuals.

We have three questions that we don't really know the answers to: Will we actually need boosters? At this point, we don't really know when people will actually become susceptible, we're guessing it might be a year but it could be earlier, it could be later, it could be never.

The second question is: Will the boosters of the original vaccine actually help against the new variants. Again, I don't think we have any data to know that one way or the other.

Then the final question is: Will people actually even use boosters? We see a lot of people don't take the flu vaccine and that's because they're not too worried about getting the flu isn't like the end of the world for most people so people who are really susceptible to dying from the flu get the flu vaccine and a lot of people who aren't going to die from the flu or don't believe they're going to die from the flu don't bother to get the flu vaccine.

Some people do, I do I'm probably not going to die from it. I do it more for other people because I don't want to get the flu and then pass it on to somebody who might die from it, but a lot of people don't get the flu vaccine.

And even if we need boosters, maybe there's more breakthroughs but people aren't getting hospitalized so people who are vaccinated get infected with COVID but don't actually end up going to the hospital. People may feel, this is just now back to flu-level pandemic and it's not that big of a deal.

In the extreme example where we need a booster quickly, and they do work with variants and people really want them, I'm not sure if we may not even have enough, we may actually need to do more orders.

Ultimately, I think that's probably not going to be the case and I think a lot of these doses are going to end up getting donated, especially when you add in the contracts as you said from Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, and AstraZeneca, of course, the latter two need FDA emergency use authorization.

Speights: Yeah, speaking of donating to other countries I failed to mention that the U.S. government is buying 500 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for donation to poor countries, so there's already another big order that the government is making to be able to give to other countries.

Brian, I've noticed that the CEOs of both Pfizer and Moderna have come out and indicated that from what they are seeing, they believe that booster doses will be needed sooner than within 12 months.

Do you think that maybe, just maybe the U.S. government is seeing some of the same data and maybe that's what's motivating their purchases of these additional doses?

Orelli: Yeah. Presumably they're still following the people in the clinical trials and looking at antibody levels. I'm not sure that they could do and I guess maybe breakthrough infections, so those would be the two things.

Antibody levels are probably a rough estimate of whether you're going to need a booster and then breakthroughs will be higher estimate although figuring out what to compare the breakthroughs to, you get a number of breakthroughs but how many would you have in placebo?

There aren't any patients on placebo anymore so you don't really know what the rate of infection would be for people who haven't been vaccinated, so that makes things a little tricky there.