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Pfizer Inc. will invest $120 million in its Portage, Michigan, facility to boost production of its COVID-19 antiviral treatment, Paxlovid, according to The Detroit News.

What’s happening: The pharmaceutical company’s Kalamazoo County facility, where the first U.S. doses of a coronavirus vaccine were produced in 2021, “is expected to help meet the global demand for Paxlovid.”

• “The site is expected to be among the world’s largest producers of active pharmaceutical ingredient for the drug with the capacity to produce 1,200 metric tons annually, officials said Monday.”
• The investment will add 250 new jobs to the facility, Pfizer said.

Why it’s important: Paxlovid is the leading at-home COVID-19 treatment. Thus far, Pfizer has manufactured more than 5.5 million packs of it across 26 nations.

• “Pfizer Global Supply has made the impossible possible, making billions of vaccine doses and now millions of treatment courses to help battle the deadly COVID-19 pandemic,” Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement. “By increasing production at our Michigan facility, we are both helping patients around the world and expanding important manufacturing innovation to the U.S.”
• Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer echoed Bourla in her remarks outside the facility Monday. “[W]ith this investment in Kalamazoo, we’re shoring up our supply chain and showing the world that Michigan is the place to be for companies who want to do big things and need the incredible workforce to accomplish those things,” she said.