In­side No­var­tis' months-long ef­forts to scale their ri­val­s' Covid-19 vac­cines

In Sep­tem­ber, No­var­tis CTO Stef­fen Lang start­ed hop­ping on video calls with his man­u­fac­tur­ing team to talk, in a rare mo­ment for any big phar­ma, about mak­ing oth­er peo­ple’s drugs.

De­spite be­ing the third-largest drug­mak­er in the world, No­var­tis played a mi­nor part in the pan­dem­ic re­sponse, hav­ing jet­ti­soned its en­tire in­fec­tious dis­ease port­fo­lio years ago. But they tried to step in where they could, lead­ing in­ter-com­pa­ny ef­forts to look for small mol­e­cule an­tivi­rals, lend­ing their gene ther­a­py fa­cil­i­ties to an aca­d­e­m­ic vac­cine ef­fort and, in an ul­ti­mate­ly awk­ward move, do­nat­ing co­pi­ous amounts of hy­drox­y­chloro­quine to the US gov­ern­ment.

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