The orders were through OWS. The best part was OWS that they would spend billions on hundreds of millions of doses even if the vaccines didn't work or had side effects. They could start production knowing they sell even if they made people grow gills. The US government also agreed not to ship the doses to other countries that might not fully indemnify Pfizer from any side effects that might occur like the US did. This is the part that's different, where normally the US government doesn't buy snake oil, insisting on seeing it works first.
Fortunately, the vaccines worked and are safe, so that's good. For some reason, I need to explicitly state this every fucking time vaccines come up because idiots keep insisting the opposite.
And "not receiving the money in advance" is pretty meaningless. If I have a guarantee the US government will give me $2 billion in 6 months, it should be trivial to debt-finance anything I need. Even if Pfizer didn't have the capital to do so internally.
Look, there were a lot of dumb things done by the US, especially by the executive branch, 2017-2021. This was not one of them. There were other parts of OWS that were stupid. But one of the best (if easiest) decisions was writing giant checks to pharma companies.
FDA requirement was valid for all the contract.
> The U.S. government will pay the companies $1.95 billion upon the receipt of the first 100 million doses, following FDA authorization or approval.
The big giant checks also was not the best decision for other countries. But it was for the US.
By comparison, Israel paid 30$ and could vaccinate the population even faster.
A $2 billion contract for 600 million doses of a vaccine if they got it through FDA are orders, not funding.
They didn't receive the money in advance either.