Excellent point to clarify. It is the materials (and equipment) for the encapsulation process that are the limiting step. Those are provided by Croda in the UK (in the case of Pfizer/BioNTech) not by BioNTech in Mainz as implied. BioNTech has very sophisticated manufacturing and packaging equipment there for sure, just not the limiting step. Or to be still more clear many labs have the ability to manufacture small quantities for initial studies, but not the volumes necessary to scale to 100M/mo capacity.

https://blog.jonasneubert.com/2021/01/10/exploring-the-suppl...

Interesting blog article, but it seems to represent the supply chain before the Mainz facility went into operation?

I read somewhere* that original materials and the process that is being used by Croda is from a small Austrian company:

https://www.polymun.com/liposomes/reference-projects/

Maybe they have also licensed their process elsewhere?

*found it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-one-leading-coronavirus-vacc...