A big up for Belgian pharma facilities. But I'm unsure about the role of operation Warp speed on this all.
As far as I'm aware, Pfizer/BionTech explicitly avoided any funding through operation Warp Speed. They received an order in phase 3 of the clinical trials.
The core issue ( why they partnered with Pfizer) for BionTech was also not production at scale, but handling clinical trials at this scale. Which ( again/also) was not related to Warp Speed.
> As far as I'm aware, no existing facilities were added?
Nowhere in your linked article indicates that "no existing facilities were added".
> As of January 2022, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is manufactured between 11 sites across five countries, including the U.S., Germany, Belgium, Ireland, and Croatia, and engages more than 20 suppliers.
I'm from Belgium and i did follow up on Puurs and i hadn't encountered any news that they needed to upgrade facilities there.
That's what you should have copied my whole sentence: "as far as I'm aware, no existing facilities were added". Which in retrospect should be upgraded actually. Didn't notice that mistake.
> they lacked the expertise to actually produce it at scale
Scaling up production is not all about expertise, but mostly about existing production capacities and how quickly they can be retooled for another production.
