They say that any publicity is good publicity. Emergent BioSolutions (EBS -10.55%) might disagree after its highly publicized COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing problems. In this Motley Fool Live video recorded on June 23, Motley Fool contributors Keith Speights and Brian Orelli answer a viewer's question about whether or not Emergent BioSolutions can recover from its recent blunders.
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Keith Speights: Angel asked, "Do you believe EBS, which is Emergent BioSolutions, can recover from its recent blunders?"
Brian Orelli: Yes, they can fix the issues that they had with the manufacturing and get better management in there to make sure that they're following all the FDA rules and good manufacturing practices.
Whether, how much of this is going to hurt their contract manufacturing business is still left to be seen, but I think that they're going to have a harder time convincing drug makers to use their contract manufacturing business.
Of course, that's only a subset of what the company does. They have a lot of contracts with the U.S. government to manufacture drugs for bioterrorism and that sort of thing. I think those contracts will stay in place. I think that as long as the government is comfortable with the fact that they're doing everything right, I think those will be fine, but I do worry about when they're competing against other contract manufacturers. I think that they're going to have a harder time getting those contracts compared to right now or before they had these issues with vaccines.
Speights: Right. Just for viewers who may not be aware of Emergent BioSolutions' blunders that the question referred to, the company had some serious issues with cross contamination, so to speak, of vaccines in its Baltimore, Maryland, facility.
It ended up resulting in Johnson and Johnson having to scrap, I think in total about 75 million doses or so of its COVID-19 vaccine. A very public black eye for Emergent BioSolutions.
