MARBURG – As Germany ponders how to accelerate its sluggish coronavirus vaccination campaign after yet another hitch involving the AstraZeneca shot, a production facility in the historic pharmaceutical center of Marburg may hold part of the answer to reliable supply in the months and years ahead.
BioNTech, the German company that developed the first widely used vaccine together with U.S. partner Pfizer, is busily starting up a production facility that it says can produce up to a billion doses this year alone.
That estimate was raised from the original hopes for 700 million. The company, which had never brought a pharmaceutical product to market before, wowed the world last year when it got authorization to sell a completely new type of