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| Severe tornado damage at a Pfizer plant in Rocky Mount, North Carolina last week |
Nobody likes to see a tornado strike homes or businesses, but this one was particularly precarious.
It destroyed part of a large Pfizer manufacturing plant that makes about 150 different medications. The Rocky Mount plant makes almost 25 percent of sterile injectable drugs used in hospitals.
The nation already faces a medication and drug shortage, and this twister could make everything worse.
As the Associated Press reports:
"Wednesday's tornado......ripped up the roof of a Pfizer factor that makes nearly 25 percent of Pfizer's sterile injectable medicines used in U.S. hospitals, according to the drugmaker.
The plant makes drugs for anesthesia, medicines that treat infections and drugs needed for surgeries. The latter are used in surgeries or intensive care units for patients who are pale on ventilators, said Mike Ganio, who studies drug shortages at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists."
The Rocky Mount Pfizer facility does not make Pfizer's Covid vaccine or medicines to treat it.
The tornado mostly wrecked the warehouse part of the sprawling Pfizer facility, which is the size of 24 football fields and employs about 2,000 people.
It's unknown how long it will take for the Pfizer plant to manufacture new products, but the production floor did not suffer that much damage.
That's potentially a glimmer of good news, reports NBC, because it would be harder to create and install new manufacturing equipment than find warehouse storage for the finished product and supplies.
The tornado had maximum winds of 150 mph as it traveled more than 16 miles through neighborhoods and industrial areas around Rocky Mount and Battleboro, North Carolina.
A tornado that strong is rare in North Carolina this time of year. The state does see intense tornadoes from time to time but they usually strike in the late winter or early spring.
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