On the evening of March 20, Chaz Calitri was getting ready to start in on his family's Friday night pizza-making tradition when his boss called.
The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer had decided to make a vaccine to fight COVID-19, the new disease caused by the novel coronavirus spreading with frightening speed in the U.S. The factory Calitri ran in Kalamazoo, Michigan, would play a key role in getting it made.
"I was really excited," he told USA TODAY. "I've been working in pharmaceutical manufacturing for almost 40 years and I've never been on a project like this."
His facility would be responsible for the last few production steps in a vaccine that could help quell the pandemic and save lives.
Reality, however, soon sunk in. It normally takes years to devise a manufacturing process and develop a new vaccine or drug. He'd been given mere months. The vaccine formula wasn't even finalized.
"I sat down on the couch a half hour later and I was horrified," Calitri said. "My head was spinning." 
During the last 10 months, Calitri and his peers at a handful of other drug companies have managed to pull off what they would have considered impossible a year ago: producing tens of millions of doses of a novel vaccine.
And he and others at Pfizer are on the verge of cutting production time for their vaccine nearly in half – from 110 to 60 days.
Although Americans are clamoring for more vaccine, people who understand the manufacturing process are amazed at how quickly so many doses have been made.
"Vaccine manufacturing is an endeavor where an almost infinite combination of things have to work perfectly," said Prashant Yadav, a health care supply chain expert at the Center for Global Development, an international think-tank that aims to reduce poverty.