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Biden will say his administration has a deal with Pfizer and Moderna for 200 million more doses by summer’s end. It may not speed up vaccinations.

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Biden will say his administration has a deal with Pfizer and Moderna for 200 million more doses by summer’s end. It may not speed up vaccinations.
A box containing vials of Moderna Covid-19 vaccine at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa, Calif., this month.
A box containing vials of Moderna Covid-19 vaccine at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa, Calif., this month.Credit…Jim Wilson/The New York Times

President Biden intends to announce on Tuesday that his administration has reached a deal with Pfizer and Moderna to secure an additional 200 million doses of coronavirus vaccine by the end of summer — a time frame that his predecessor had also envisioned, and one that may not accelerate the current pace of vaccination.

In a phone call with reporters to preview the announcement, a senior administration official said the purchases would boost the administration’s total vaccine order by 50 percent, raising it from 400 million to 600 million doses — enough to vaccinate 300 million Americans. The supply will be delivered “over the course of the summer,” the official said.

“We have now purchased enough vaccine vaccinate 300 million Americans,” the official said. “That’s good news. That’s going to require some a lot of patience, but should allow people who are interested in getting vaccinated — which we believe will be the vast majority of the country — to know that the supply has been purchased.”

Although the president has been in office for less than a week, he is already under intense pressure from a frustrated public to accelerate vaccinations. Tuesday’s announcement will enable Mr. Biden to underscore that heshares those concerns.

Speeding up what has been a slow distribution of vaccines has taken on more urgency with the arrival of more contagious virus variants in the country.

But while the president has vowed to use the Defense Production Act if necessary to increase vaccine supply, there is little he can do in the short term. Federal health officials and corporate executives agree that it will be hard to boost the immediate supply of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines — the only two that have federal authorization — before April because of lack of manufacturing capacity.

Pfizer had agreed last summer to provide an initial 100 million doses to the United States by the end of March. Under a new agreement reached last month by the administration of former President Donald J. Trump, Pfizer agreed to provide an additional 70 million doses by the end of June and another 30 million by the end of July, doubling the deliveries it promised in the initial contract.

This latest deal would apparently obligate Pfizer to deliver another 100 million over the summer, or roughly the third quarter of the year.

The original contract said that while the government could request that new tranche of vaccine, Pfizer could “reasonably” refuse it. But there was little expectation that Pfizer, an American company, would do so.

The official also said the federal government’s weekly allocations of coronavirus vaccines will increase by about 1.4 million doses next week — a jump that Jeffrey Zients, who runs the White House Covid response team, had planned to tell governors about on a call Tuesday afternoon, according to a federal official familiar with the government’s planning.

The increase, to around 10 million doses a week, will come from the federal government’s plans to release more of the vaccine made by Moderna, the Massachusetts biotech company whose vaccine was authorized for emergency use in December. Although governors will probably welcome the news, it does not reflect any increase in the overall amount that Moderna will deliver to the federal government in the first three months of this year, according to people familiar with the company’s production.

— Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Noah Weiland, Sharon LaFraniere and Katie Thomas
The New York Times