Manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccines: Pfizer and BioNTech SE have promised to raise their Covid-19 vaccine production target for this year to 2 billion shots, as the partners respond to a global rush of countries seeking to order more doses.

The drugmakers who have already produced more than half the capacity, on Monday, said a more than 50% boost from the previous 2021 target of 1.3 billion doses will incorporate a label change that will allow doctors to extract six doses instead of five from each vaccine vial.

“We now believe that we can potentially deliver approximately 2 billion doses in total by the end of 2021, which incorporates the updated six-dose label.”

European regulators, last week, approved doctors drawing six doses from each vial, boosting dosage capacity by 20 percent.

The Mainz-based company, which developed the jab with US giant Pfizer, is planning to open a new factory in Marburg, Germany, in February, expected to ramp up production capacity by 750 million doses a year.

The company said it had shipped nearly 33 million doses by January 10, more than a month after Britain became the first Western nation to approve any vaccine on December 2.

BioNTech’s announcement comes after the EU agreed to raise its orders of the vaccine by 200 million doses, with an option for another 100 million.

But the vaccination rollout has been criticised across Europe, with sluggish starts in nations like France and the Netherlands.

The company added that Covid-19 will “likely become an endemic disease”, and that vaccines would need to fight against the emergence of new viral variants and a “naturally waning immune response”.