Health Care 2024: ANTHONY ‘TONY’ BAKER

Baker leads Fortune 500 pharma manufacturer Merck’s vaccine operations in Elkton. The company founded a plant in the Rockingham County town in 1941.

Early in his career, Baker spent seven years at Pennsylvania-based Biopharm Project Solutions as a senior process specialist. He joined Merck in 2008 as a process engineer and went on to engineering leadership positions in Pennsylvania and Switzerland, before coming to Virginia in 2015.

Merck entered into a collaboration with Gavi, an international vaccine organization, and UNICEF in 2017 to supply more than 90 million doses of its human papillomavirus vaccines to low- and middle- income countries between 2021 and 2025. To boost capacity to make the vaccine, Merck in 2022 completed construction on a 120,000-square-feet expansion of its facility in Elkton.

On April 18, however, The New York Times reported that because of production problems, millions of African girls would miss HPV shots because Merck would only be able to distribute 18.8 million of 29.6 million doses it was contracted to deliver in 2024. Days later, Merck announced it had altered its initial commitment to supply 115 million doses of the HPV vaccine to Gavi-supported countries through 2025.