Moderna Inc. said Tuesday it will offer its new Covid-19 vaccine to its own employees, contractors and board members in a move the company said would provide an additional layer of protection to workers involved in making and delivering the vaccine.
The Cambridge, Mass., company, which has about 1,200 employees, said the small quantities of vaccine needed for the program are separate from the millions of doses Moderna has committed to the U.S. government.
Moderna has said it expects to provide about 20 million doses for use in the U.S. by the end of this month, and a total of about 200 million by the middle of 2021. The federal government has purchased the doses and is overseeing their distribution.
The company’s new policy would appear to allow the vaccination of some people who aren’t in the high-priority groups identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC has said the first people who should receive the limited initial supply of available vaccine doses are health-care workers and residents of long-term-care facilities, followed later by people 75 years and older and certain essential workers such as police officers and manufacturing workers.
The CDC didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.