Richard Hatchett is, in his own words, one of the few people who have “made a career out of worrying about pandemics”. After the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, the expert in responding to epidemics who was then a White House staffer, helped the US government establish pharmaceutical factories ready to be switched on to defend against a future health threat.
But one of these facilities, run by Emergent BioSolutions, has become a liability in the Covid-19 pandemic. Tens of millions of Johnson & Johnson doses were ruined after they were contaminated with the AstraZeneca vaccine. The regulator discovered unsanitary conditions and poorly trained staff. The production line was halted for more than 100 days.
“Somehow, in that process of needing to surge and scale up when the crisis hit, their quality systems and controls broke down and they were not able to deliver the thing they were created to deliver,” Hatchett says.