For years, the seven-member crew shared stages, hotel rooms and head colds building an international following one sweaty show at a time. Dessa's work within the collective and as a solo artist earned several entries on the Billboard Top charts Chime , Parts of Speech and All Hands.
Since her teenage years, however, Dessa wanted to become a published writer. So while recording and touring as a musician, she continued to write poetry, essays and short stories. Under the Doomtree banner, she began printing short books, some barely larger than a matchbook. In , Doomtree Press published Spiral Bound , a collection of poetry and prose.
She also became a frequent radio contributor: on behalf of Minnesota Public Radio, she's interviewed best-selling authors in front of live audiences most recently talking with Michael Pollan about his exploration into psychedelic drugs. You have JavaScript disabled. Menu Main menu. Big gamble. Pfizer met its first milestones with substantial upfront investment, and it had no guarantees.
Pfizer was part of Operation Warp Speed as a potential supplier for Covid vaccines and had a purchase agreement for an initial million doses. However, the company didn't receive federal funding for the research or development of the vaccine. So while Pfizer could repurpose some of its equipment at its main manufacturing site in Kalamazoo, most of what's there now didn't exist a year ago.
So all completely at risk. We didn't know if we had a product that was going to work," said McDermott. Before Pfizer decided on its final vaccine candidate, it was looking into four different options. That meant McDermott and his team had to be ready to go in any direction. So you just start buying ingredients," he said. Let's bring in the standard materials that we need. So filling up this pantry was quite, quite expensive.
Pfizer's global goal is 2. One of the biggest rate-limiting steps of this production, according to McDermott, has been the availability of raw materials and specifically lipids, the fatty substance that safely houses the mRNA until it can get to our cells.
So the lipid suppliers weren't very large. And so we work very closely with them to build more lipids capacity, and actually making lipids in this site in Kalamazoo, Michigan," said McDermott. The heart of mRNA. The impingement jet mixer, also known as the tea stirrer, works by simply pumping lipids in one side and mRNA in the other, forcing them together with pounds of pressure.
That's what creates the lipid nanoparticle which is essentially the vaccine. While the process of creating lipid nanoparticles is not new, McDermott said the challenge was scaling up this process. So my confidence level was actually quite low.
Not that it could be done, I knew it worked at this scale, but how could you multiply it? McDermott's first thought was to go bigger, make a large-scale tea stirrer to allow more volume to pass through. When that didn't work, they ended up replicating the quarter-sized mixers and put technology in place to ensure efficiency in order to scale up production. And that allowed us to get more production out. Even though this size is small, we were able to really scale this up our original design for this machine.
We're currently operating at four times the capacity. Make it modular. Part of what has allowed Pfizer to continue to make room for these new formulation suites has been its strategy of using prefabricated construction.
It's possible to reach herd immunity, then lose it. Here's what you can do to help prevent that from happening. In its 1,acre foot Kalamazoo facility, Pfizer is installing around 13, square feet of modular rooms that are first built in Texas and then shipped to Kalamazoo. The question was, how can we do it quickly? If we built it wall by wall on site, it would have taken us a year. By doing it modularly, we could cut that in half," says McDermott.
Moving each room into place is surprisingly easy. With the help of compressed air -- think of an air hockey table -- you can simply slide them into place. Then the rooms are ready to be connected to electricity, sterilized and put to use.
With each of these improvements, Pfizer says it has gone from producing 3 to 4 million doses of vaccine a week to 13 million doses a week.
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