Fallout of Rocky Mount tornado could present challenge for Pfizer

Pfizer is confident its North Carolina injectables plant “will go back to life” after suffering tornado damage but warns of near-term revenue challenges.

A tornado ripped through Rocky Mount, North Carolina last month forcing a halt to operations at Pfizer’s sterile injectables facility. While no staff was injured, the plant – which produces more than 200 million units annually – suffered significant damage.

“It was severe,” Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla said on an earnings call this week. “The damage was mainly concentrated on the warehouse, which means that we lost a lot of inventory that was about to be sent to the markets.”

DepositPhotos/aliceinwonderland2020

The facilities themselves, he continued, were not directly damaged. “However, because the utilities were discontinued, the facilities had to stop operating. And in this highly sensitive, sterile environment, when you are losing power, it’s not easy to switch on and switch off. It takes time and a lot of processes so that you can [restart operations].”

Despite this and additional challenges surrounding inventories of materials that were also destroyed – particularly glass products – Bourla said the site will make a full recovery.

“We feel very confident that the whole thing will go back to life. But still, we are assessing how long that will take. And we are doing anything we can to make sure that we will minimize the shortages in the marketplace because of that.”

Management stated the fallout from the tornado “presents near-term revenue challenges,” but no further details were given.

For the second quarter 2023, revenues stood at $12.7 billion, down 54% on the same period last year due to a sharp but expected decline in sales of COVID-19 antiviral Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir) and vaccine Comirnaty (tozinameran).