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Emergent Debuts New Campaign During Bowl Season

Emergent Debuts New Campaign During Bowl Season

Emergent was pleased to debut our new campaign during the 2021 college football bowl season through a partnership with the Military Bowl to benefit our nation’s current and former service members.

Emergent BioSolutions CEO: ‘Confrontational’ coverage of vaccine maker puts a target on ‘people doing good’ | COMMENTARY

As the CEO of a 2,000-plus person Maryland-based company involved in the COVID-19 response, I have a high tolerance for the obligations that come with it — like spending endless hours trying to explain complicated manufacturing processes to reporters who just learned we existed. Or battling back the misinformation that is used to find fault with the people who are the spine of our nation’s world-leading response to this pandemic.

But it pains me to watch how this negative attention affects our workforce. We talk about front line health care workers a lot, as we should. They are extraordinary, and we could not have done this without them this past year. But so are the men and women who sacrificed their personal lives to spend the past year developing and manufacturing the vaccines that will bring this terrible chapter to a close. That includes our Baltimore-area workforce at Emergent, to whom I will be forever indebted.

Emergent has been in the news a lot lately, and that’s frankly not something we’re used to. Until a year ago we were a little-known company that does our work behind the scenes. COVID-19 changed all that overnight. We help our nation prepare and respond to global calamities, like the opioid epidemic or a biological attack or fighting COVID-19.

For the first few months, it was welcome because our employees were getting recognition I thought was warranted given our company’s impressive track record. But people in our country, or at least some in our media, tend to put a target on the backs of people doing good. So, the attention grew confrontational

Read the full commentary on Baltimoresun.com.

Emergent BioSolutions CEO Robert G. Kramer Appointed to Manufacturers Association Board

Emergent BioSolutions’ president and chief executive officer, Robert G. Kramer, has been named to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) Board of Directors. Kramer will join the NAM Board to bolster the association’s leadership in policy advocacy, workforce solutions, legal action, operational excellence and news and insights. He will help the industry advance an agenda that promotes growth and prosperity for all Americans.

“I am honored to serve on the NAM Board to represent the important work of our company and our industry as a whole and to ensure continued growth and success as manufacturers,” said Mr. Kramer. “I look forward to sharing Emergent’s 22+ years of experience partnering, developing, and manufacturing critical vaccines, therapeutics, and devices, as well as providing contract development and manufacturing (CDMO) services to deliver for the nation as manufacturing leads our country out of this pandemic.”

“Bob is a recognized leader in our industry, and the NAM will be stronger thanks to his service on our Board of Directors,” said NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons. “Manufacturers are the driving force behind our economic recovery and our fight to defeat COVID-19. The NAM’s mission is to ensure we always keep moving forward, and Bob will bring invaluable insights as we advocate for the men and women of our industry and advance the values that have made America exceptional and our industry strong—free enterprise, competitiveness, individual liberty and equal opportunity.”

Founded in 1895, the NAM, guided by its Board of Directors, is the largest industrial trade association in the United States with more than 14,000 members and is the nation’s most influential advocate for manufacturing. The NAM’s membership includes some of the world’s most iconic brands and many of the small manufacturers that power the U.S. economy. Nearly 90% of the NAM’s members are small and medium-sized businesses.

The organization has become a “one-stop shop” for manufacturers, telling the stories of manufacturers and equipping manufacturers with invaluable resources through our news and insights channels and partnerships with the Manufacturing Leadership Council and Manufacturing Institute.

The NAM and its members are at the forefront of every important policy debate for manufacturers and have led the nation’s response to COVID-19. The NAM has worked with member companies to mobilize personal protective equipment and other key resources. Manufacturers have come to the aid of the nation and are leading by example with campaigns on safe health practices and vaccine acceptance. Executives on the NAM Board, which comprises leaders representing companies of all sizes in every industrial sector, are the driving force behind the NAM’s efforts.

Board members play a key role in the NAM’s “Creators Wanted” campaign, a member-driven initiative to inspire and drive more Americans to pursue careers in modern manufacturing. The campaign, which supports Manufacturing Institute programs for students, women, veterans and underrepresented communities and is punctuated by a mobile tour, seeks to cut the skills gap by 600,000 workers by 2025 and increase the number of students enrolling in technical schools, vocational schools and apprenticeships, as well as the number of parents who would encourage their children to pursue a career in modern manufacturing.

Workers Producing the Vaccine Need Vaccination

Emergent BioSolutions President and CEO Bob Kramer writes in The Wall Street Journal that the people manufacturing vaccines should be prioritized to receive them. Read what he says here. 

In the race to vaccinate people for Covid-19, everyone agrees front-line health workers, the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions should get priority. But one vital group is being overlooked. Even worse, some are criticizing efforts to vaccinate them as some sort of effort to “cut the line.”

I’m referring to the thousands of people working to produce critical vaccines, medications and diagnostics for Covid-19. In addition to Pfizer and Moderna, my company, Emergent BioSolutions, has been ramping up manufacturing of hundreds of millions of vaccine doses for partners like Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca in close coordination with the federal government.

Emergent’s employees are essential to the Covid-19 response, and we have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect them. Unfortunately, our strict safety protocols, like the use of personal protective equipment, disinfection of work areas and regular testing, are no guarantee against infection.

Over the past year, we have quarantined hundreds of team members—nearly one-third of our small on-site workforce. Some were exposed outside the workplace, but the primary cause of quarantine is potential exposure to an infected fellow employee. This situation puts a tremendous strain on our 24/7 operations. Absenteeism means other employees have to work multiple back-to-back shifts to avoid a manufacturing shutdown. So far, we’ve avoided delays in vaccine production, but the risk is real—we briefly had to slow down operations at another facility because of Covid-related absenteeism.

Read Bob’s full commentary on WSJ.com 

Our Commitments to Combat COVID-19

  • We are committed to the health and well-being of our employees and their families and have enacted measures to protect their health and safety.
  • We are committed to combating COVID-19 by developing and manufacturing plasma-derived therapeutics on our proprietary hyperimmune platforms, as well as deploying our vaccine and contract development and manufacturing capabilities and expertise.
  • We are committed to continuing critical ongoing clinical development programs and enterprise business operations.
  • We are committed to the public health goal of “flattening the curve” and have mandated employees who can work from home to do so.
  • We are committed to securing our supply chain and manufacturing infrastructure not only to deliver on our COVID-19 program goals, but also to ensure the continued availability of all our critical products and services to patients and customers.
  • We are grateful for the committed support of all our employees and the trust our patients and customers have invested in us as we all navigate this evolving global emergency together.

Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies play a critical role in protecting public health and we believe it is important that we continue to operate critical laboratory and manufacturing operations as part of this public health infrastructure. As it relates to COVID-19, Emergent may have an expanded role in the response to the pandemic. We are actively monitoring the situation and are working to ensure that our policies to prevent the spread of infection are balanced with our commitment to serve patients and customers during this evolving global emergency.

In Conversation with Sean Kirk

Following up on the recent article Two Maryland Biotechs Partner to Bring Coronavirus/COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate into Clinical Trials, BioBuzz had the opportunity to speak with Emergent BioSolutions Executive Vice President, Manufacturing and Technical Operations, Sean Kirk.

Let’s start by having you provide a brief background on your role at Emergent.

I have been with the company for nearly 17 years, and have had the good fortune of working in and being responsible for many key parts of the business including manufacturing operations, quality assurance, regulatory affairs, product development, U.S. government program management, global operational excellence, global supply chain, medical and clinical affairs. In these roles I have spent a lot of time across Emergent’s sites and have been based in Lansing, Mich. – where I started – Gaithersburg, Md, and Winnipeg, Manitoba. I am currently responsible for the oversight of global manufacturing operations, supply chain management, global operational excellence, medical/clinical/regulatory affairs, and our CDMO Business Unit, and I am based out of our headquarters in Gaithersburg.

With the evolving news around COVID-19 and your partnership with Novavax being announced last week to work on a vaccine, what can you tell us about Emergent that most people wouldn’t know?

For 22 years, Emergent’s mission has remained the same – to protect and enhance life. Our focus has been on products and services that address serious public health threats, such as biological and chemical warfare agents, emerging infectious diseases, and opioid overdoses. The current COVID-19 challenge we are facing is complex and Emergent is committed to a multi-faceted response as we marshal our resources, such as the capabilities, capacities, and expertise of our network in support of our Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization (CDMO) Business Unit. For COVID-19 specifically, three of our Maryland facilities are involved, including our Gaithersburg labs, our Emergent Bayview facility in Baltimore, which is designated as a Center for Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing (CIADM) by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and our Camden fill/finish facility, which is also in Baltimore. We also have our decades-long history in vaccines and therapeutics to offer.

Read the full article on BioBuzz.

BIO International 2019 with Sean Kirk

​Pharma’s Almanac TV published a video interview from BIO International 2019 with Sean Kirk, executive vice president, manufacturing and technical operations, in which he discusses Emergent’s cultural foundations based in the company’s roots as a government contractor.

Please take a moment to watch the short video interview at this link.

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