Is Novavax next? When will kids get vaccinated? What about the rest of the world? Here’s a roundup of the latest COVID-19 vaccine headlines over the past week.
Is Novavax next? Last week, POLITICO called it the “most promising coronavirus vaccine you’ve never heard of” (unless you read Good Day BIO, of course)—and the company secured an additional $147 million in Operation Warp Speed funding.
Novavax is expected to file for emergency use authorization in the United States within the next few weeks. Meanwhile, the Serum Institute of India is stockpiling doses to be ready to go, while South Korea is expected to begin local manufacturing in June.
If authorized, the Novavax vaccine would join the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson shots, which have allowed 147 million people in the United States to receive at least one dose as of today.
Meanwhile, manufacturing continues to ramp up as plans to export more doses take shape. Pfizer has begun exporting doses of its U.S.-made vaccine, while Moderna announced a partnership with Sanofi to make 200 million doses for the U.S. as well as additional investments to increase global supply to as many as 3 billion doses in 2022.
And Pfizer is donating $70 million in COVID-19 medicines to India, "the largest humanitarian relief effort in [the] company's history," wrote CEO Albert Bourla on LinkedIn. Pfizer is seeking "expedited approval" of its vaccine in India, where the COVID crisis worsens by the hour.
Read: “No one is safe until we are all safe; global and universal access to COVID-19 vaccines is a public health and humanitarian imperative,” wrote BIO’s Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath in The Economist.
What about the kids? Trials are underway, with BioNTech’s CEO telling CNBC Friday that they expect data on the safety and efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in kids ages 5-11 by the end of the summer; they’ve already asked the EU to authorize it for older children, reports the AP, with positive topline results announced in March.
Read: How Pfizer makes its COVID-19 vaccine
The biggest challenge now? Vaccine hesitancy.The majority of Americans who want a vaccine have one, although there are still large pockets of hesitancy.
BIO continues to address vaccine hesitancy. Check out our recent podcast episode featuring voices of vaccine hesitancy, and visit www.COVIDVaccineFacts.org to get answers to your vaccine questions.
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Quartz: What can mRNA treat next?
Biologist Derrick Rossi, one of the founders of Moderna, “predicts we’ll have the first non-vaccine mRNA therapeutic drug within five years, and there will be 25 or 30 approved ones in the next decade.”
