The Biden administration on Wednesday announced a $3.2 billion deal to purchase 105 million doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for a fall vaccination campaign, with options to buy up to 300 million doses.
The contract includes a combination of adult and pediatric doses, and supplies of a re-formulated booster shot that will contain the original Wuhan variant and BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday advised COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers to produce the updated booster vaccine — which has not yet undergone human clinical trials — for this fall.
“This agreement will provide additional doses for U.S. residents and help cope with the next COVID-19 wave,” Sean Marett, chief business and chief commercial officer of BioNTech, said in a statement. “Pending regulatory authorization, it will also include an Omicron-adapted vaccine, which we believe is important to address the rapidly spreading Omicron variant.”
The announcement followed Tuesday’s meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, which recommended including an Omicron component in future COVID-19 booster vaccines.
“Vaccines have been a game-changer in our fight against COVID-19, allowing people to return to normal activities knowing that vaccines protect from severe illness,” said Xavier Becerra, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
“The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to doing everything we can to continue to make vaccines free and widely available to Americans — and this is an important first step to preparing us for the fall.”
However, U.S. taxpayers will fund the $3.2 billion campaign, just as they also paid $1.95 billion for the original 100 million doses obtained under Operation Warp Speed, and $19.50 per dose for 500 million more doses obtained through the government’s option contract.
“Earlier this month, in the absence of additional COVID-19 funding from Congress, the Administration was forced to reallocate $10 billion in existing funding, pulling billions of dollars from COVID-19 response efforts in order to pay for additional vaccines and treatments,” HHS said in a statement. “The funding for this new Pfizer contract is being paid for with a portion of that reallocated funding.”
“The White House has dropped all pretense that this is about protecting public health,” said Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief legal counsel for Children’s Health Defense. “This is an unsheathed, corporate welfare project to further enrich the shareholders of the most profitable industry in history.”
“It’s almost as if these states — and their citizens — are paying for these vaccines twice over: once to bankroll much, or nearly all, of the research itself, then again to buy back the products of this public-funded research,” Quartz reported last month. “Pharma corporations benefit hugely from this model.”
Pfizer said in May it expects about $32 billion in COVID-19 vaccine sales for 2022, but the figure was based on agreements signed before the new contract announced this week.
Pfizer on June 23 approved a quarterly cash dividend of $0.40 per share.
Under the new Pfizer deal, the U.S. government is set to pay more than $30 per dose on average, which is significantly higher than the $19.50 it paid in its initial Pfizer contract.
As early as Feb. 26, 2021, Pfizer was planning for a “potential rapid adoption” of its COVID-19 vaccine to allow for the development of booster vaccines within weeks. This “regulatory pathway” is already established for other infectious diseases, such as influenza, Pfizer said in a statement.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said the company was “making the right investments and engaging in the appropriate conversations with regulators” to help position the company to “potentially develop and seek authorization for an updated mRNA vaccine or booster if needed.”
During a February 2021 earnings call, Bourla told analysts, big banks and investors the company could make significant profits as demand for its COVID-19 vaccine subsidies by charging higher prices and implementing routine booster doses for new variants of the virus.
During the Barclays’ Global Health Conference in March 2021, former Pfizer CFO Frank D’Amelio said the company doesn’t see this as a one-time event, but “as something that’s going to continue for the foreseeable future.”
“Every year, you need to go to get your flu vaccine,” Pfizer CEO Bourla said. “It’s going to be the same with COVID. In a year, you will have to go and get your annual shot for COVID to be protected.”
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
