The North Carolina Pfizer plant damaged in Wednesday’s tornado was a key supplier of sterile injectable medicines used in U.S. hospitals.
The result will likely be long-term shortages, the company said Thursday, though specific drugs and damages have yet to be determined.
The tornado, an EF-3 that cut a 16.5-mile swath through the state, ripped the roof off the Pfizer facility and decimated numerous houses. No one was seriously injured at the plant, the company said, and everyone was evacuated.
Elsewhere, 16 people were injured, two of them with life-threatening injuries, WRAL-TV reported.
It was the first tornado of this magnitude ever seen in central North Carolina during July, the National Weather Service said.
Rooves were shredded throughout the multi-building Pfizer facility, whose 1.4 million-square-foot manufacturing area is the size of 24 football fields. More than 2,000 people work there. Stored medicine was flung everywhere.
“I’ve got reports of 50,000 pallets of medicine that are strewn across the facility and damaged through the rain and the wind,” Nash County Sheriff Keith Stone told CBS News.
The Pfizer factory makes about a quarter of the company’s sterile injectable medicines used in U.S. hospitals. Also made at the plant are anesthesia drugs, medicines that combat things like fungal infections, and other drugs used on ventilated patients.
Definitely not at that site were COVID-19 vaccines, and neither were the treatments Comirnaty and Paxlovid, the company said.
The tornado also destroyed distribution and storage buildings and damaged upwards of 100 vehicles and storage trucks, WRAL reported.
Pfizer said it was assessing the damage specifics and needed time to move production elsewhere and rebuild.
With News Wire Services
