By Elizabeth Koh
SEOUL -- Contract-manufacturing companies working to accelerate
the global availability of Covid-19 vaccines are struggling with a
shortage of their own: There aren't enough workers to meet this
year's big production push.
The talent pool is so tight that Emergent BioSolutions Inc., a
Covid-19 contractor based in Gaithersburg, Md., for AstraZeneca PLC
and Johnson & Johnson, enlisted its CEO and a half-dozen other
senior executives to pitch potential hires at a virtual career fair
in October. More than 550 people attended.
Not enough of them were swayed. More than two months later,
Emergent still has roughly 200 openings for warehouse associates,
quality-assurance analysts and even a supply-chain management
director. "Hiring and ramping up has become challenging," said Sean
Kirk, an Emergent executive vice president, who spoke at the
event.
Outsourcing companies such as Emergent make about one-sixth of
complex treatments including vaccines, but the scale and abruptness
of Covid-19 shots is likely to boost that share much higher, say
industry executives and experts. With demand dwarfing supply,
Pfizer Inc., Moderna Inc. and others are turning to contract
manufacturers for assistance in what is the largest pharmaceutical
rollout in modern history.
But those helping drugmakers need more help themselves. More
than 5,000 open jobs exist at the world's 10 largest companies that
have won Covid-19 outsourcing work, according to a Wall Street
Journal analysis of the companies' websites. The firms were ranked
by production capacity.
The labor crunch is another potential drag on a global vaccine
rollout already facing a supply backlog and requiring near-flawless
logistics. Many contract manufacturers are trying to fill roles
that often require years of experience in pharmaceutical
manufacturing or biotechnology-related degrees. They are also
struggling to hire workers willing to work overnight shifts, as
production goes round-the-clock. The jobs are likely to be
permanent.
"We are truly in unprecedented territory because of the
world-wide demand outstripping supply," said Rena Conti, a Boston
University business professor who studies biopharmaceutical supply
chains.
Many contract manufacturers were already staffing up before the
pandemic. Demand has soared for niche production of complex
medications treating diseases such as breast cancer or rheumatoid
arthritis, taken by a minority of the population. But Covid-19
vaccines have created a massive new product category where the
potential market is every person on Earth.
"I'm hard pressed to think of another event where we saw such
rapid expansion," said Gil Roth, president of the Pharma &
Biopharma Outsourcing Association, which represents contract
manufacturers in the U.S. and Europe.
World production of Covid-19 vaccines is expected to reach 6
billion doses in 2021, according to industry tracker PharmSource.
Nearly every major pharmaceutical company with a potential vaccine
candidate has enlisted contract manufacturers to help meet
production targets.
BioNTech SE, which developed with Pfizer one of the vaccines
being distributed in the West, has several publicly known deals
with contract manufacturers in Europe. Moderna, which developed
another vaccine used by Western countries, also has tapped several
contractors, including Lonza Group AG, a biopharmaceutical
manufacturing giant that produces the vaccine's key ingredient.
Catalent Inc., one of the largest contract manufacturers in the
U.S., has leaned into unusual recruiting strategies, including ads
on the radio-streaming app, Pandora, targeting people who live near
its manufacturing plants. It offers $3,000 sign-on bonuses for its
manufacturing associates willing to work overnight shifts at its
Madison, Wis., facility.
The company, based in Somerset, N.J., has hundreds of unfilled
jobs, which could directly affect how much extra production it can
allot to Covid-19 vaccines, said Bernie Clark, Catalent's vice
president of marketing and strategy. The company has signed
multiple Covid-19 vaccine contracts, including deals to produce
compounds for Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.
"To keep adding capacity and new lines, you have to have the
people to run them," Mr. Clark said.
Lonza, the Swiss contractor, is recruiting dozens of new
employees from quality-assurance managers to engineers at one of
its facilities in Switzerland, which is expected to turn out 300
million doses over the next year. Sweden's Recipharm AB, another
Moderna contractor helping with late-stage production, is hiring
about 65 workers for a plant in France, the company said.
Avid Bioservices Inc., of Tustin, Calif., which has contracts to
make components for multiple vaccine candidates, expects to recruit
about 40 new employees by next summer -- or double a typical year,
said Lorna Larson, the company's senior director in human
resources. Those workers require six months of training, detailing
how Avid handles manufacturing and assists clients. The plan is to
keep the new hires long-term, incorporating them into Avid's staff
of 234 employees, Ms. Larson said.
"The pandemic has just accelerated the fight for talent," she
said. "It really is critical right now -- and there's a lot of
competition for it."
Write to Elizabeth Koh at Elizabeth.Koh@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 04, 2021 07:57 ET (12:57 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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