Moderna ditches 400,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses

Moderna Inc. had to discard 400,000 doses of its experimental Covid-19 shot after a filtration issue compromised the product during the final manufacturing stages, a US official said Thursday.

Moncef Slaoui, Operation Warp Speed’s chief scientific adviser, disclosed Moderna’s manufacturing hiccup in an interview with Bloomberg News. The 400,000 doses, which weren’t yet placed in vials, were part of a broader 1.4 million batch of its vaccine, Slaoui said.

Moderna, however, remains on track to meet its production estimates of 20 million doses this month, and 85 to 100 million doses for the US in the first quarter of 2021, according to Ray Jordan, a spokesman for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company.

Jordan declined to comment on the filtration issue or the discarding of the supply.