COVID-19 vaccine Archives - Page 30 of 38

EU secures four million additional doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine

The European Commission has announced that it has secured four million more COVID-19 vaccine doses than it had expected to be delivered over the next two weeks.

The vaccines will help E.U. “tackle coronavirus hotspots,” “facilitate free border movement” and fight COVID-19 variants.

The E.U. has been involved in a recent vaccine-related tussle with the U.K., with European Council President Charles Michel accusing the U.K. of blocking vaccine exports to the Continent. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has refuted that claim.

The U.K. has outpaced the E.U. in vaccine administration, having administered vaccines to more than a third of its population while the E.U. has done so for 9.5%.

Several regions in Europe have seen infection rates and hospitalizations tick up recently, including Tyrol in Austria, Nice and Moselle in France, Bolzano in Italy and some parts of Bavaria and Saxony in Germany.

Report: Biden to buy 100M additional doses of J&J COVID-19 vaccine

President Joe Biden is reportedly set to announce plans to purchase an additional 100 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s (NYSE:JNJ) COVID-19 vaccine.

An NBC News report said that Biden is set to announce the purchase of the single-dose vaccines on Wednesday, according to two officials from his administration.

Get the full story at our sister site, Drug Discovery & Development.

Report: Biden to buy 100M additional doses of J&J COVID-19 vaccine

President Joe Biden is reportedly set to announce plans to purchase an additional 100 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s (NYSE:JNJ) COVID-19 vaccine.

An NBC News report said that Biden is set to announce the purchase of the single-dose vaccines on Wednesday, according to two officials from his administration.

The purchase of doses from Johnson & Johnson, which became the third authorized COVID-19 vaccine in the U.S. last month (and the first single-dose vaccine), puts the U.S. in a position in which it has more than enough supply to vaccinate the entire population of the country. This comes after Biden recently pushed forward the timeline for having enough doses to vaccinate every American, moving it from the end of July to the end of May.

Biden is reportedly set to direct the U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services to procure the doses during a meeting with executives from J&J and Merck, having announced earlier this month that the…

What are the most common COVID-19 vaccine side effects?

[Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash]

Now that it has been nearly four months since the FDA authorized the first COVID-19 vaccine, a decent amount of safety information is available about the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

CDC recently released a summary of adverse event data related to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine based on more than 5,000 entries to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System collected from Dec. 14, 2020, to Jan. 13.

The summary also included data related to more than 1,000 recipients of the first dose of Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.

The entries make up only a minuscule fraction of the more than 90 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine that Americans have received to date.

A total of 93.7% of the reports related to the first dose of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were nonserious, although that figure dropped to 78.6% when it came to the second dose. For the Moderna vaccine, 81.2% of the event…

Baxter to make Moderna COVID-19 vaccine in US

Baxter announced that its Baxter BioPharma Solutions business will make Moderna‘s COVID-19 vaccine at its fill/finish sterile manufacturing facilities in Bloomington, Ind.

The plan — announced yesterday — is for Baxter to make 60–90 million doses of the Moderna vaccine in 2021.

“We have seen a remarkable demonstration of scientific and health care expertise in the effort to develop vaccines for COVID-19,” said Marie Keeley, VP of Baxter BioPharma Solutions.

Get the full story on our sister site Pharmaceutical Processing World.

Why intranasal vaccines confer immunity where it matters

Mucosa and relevant structures. [Image from Wikipedia]

The COVID-19 vaccine landscape is gradually becoming more diverse. And it could grow more so, as several companies work on intranasal vaccines.

Intranasal vaccines offer potential advantages over traditional intramuscular vaccines. They can stimulate immunoglobulin A production, which can avert infection, as a recent Scientific American article noted.

“It’s not insignificant to go from a needle-based delivery to nasal delivery,” said Dr. C. Buddy Creech, who is the director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program.

Buddy Creech, MD. Photo by Joe Howell

The approach has several clear advantages. Intranasal vaccines would likely generate mucosal immunity, reducing the virus’s odds to take root in the respiratory tract.

And once pediatric COVID-19 vaccines are available…

Intranasal COVID-19 vaccines could be on the horizon

Image courtesy of AltImmune

All of the COVID-19 vaccines authorized to date are delivered via intramuscular injection. But the intranasal vaccines that are now in development could lead to a more diverse vaccine landscape.

The company Altimmune (Gaithersburg, Md.) recently launched a Phase 1 clinical trial to test its single-dose adCOVID intranasal vaccine in 180 adult volunteers. Bharat Biotech (Hyderabad, India) is launching its own tests. In Europe, a newly-founded company known as Rokote Laboratories (Joensuu, Finland) is doing the same.

Intranasal vaccines could offer key advantages over intramuscular vaccines, said Dr. C. Buddy Creech, a professor within the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

First, an intranasal vaccine could trigger a broad immune response that includes both systemic immunity and local immunity in the respirator…

Canada authorizes J&J’s COVID-19 vaccine

Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash

Canada is hoping to accelerate its mass-vaccination program with the authorization of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine, which the FDA also recently authorized.

Canada has now authorized four vaccines.

Pfizer has also agreed to ramp up deliveries to the country.

By the end of June, Canada could have 36.5 million vaccine doses. The country’s population is 37.9 million.

Ontario, the most densely populated province, also announced that it would allow the first and second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines to be administered with an up to four-month interval between doses.

The J&J vaccine currently requires only a single dose, although the company is testing a two-dose regimen.

Because the U.S. isn’t currently allowing domestically produced vaccines to be exported, Canada has relied on Europe and Asia to provide vacci…

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy reducing, but challenges remain

Image courtesy of Pexels

The likely timeline for vaccinating a large share of the U.S. public has tightened recently. On Tuesday, President Biden promised enough COVID-19 vaccine would be available for all Americans by the end of May.

But while increases in vaccine production can address the current vaccine shortage, vaccine hesitancy will likely curb vaccination efforts in the coming months, according to Philipp Rosenbaum, a senior healthcare analyst at GlobalData. “With increases in vaccine production from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, a newly authorized vaccine from Johnson and Johnson, and a manufacturing partnership between J&J and Merck & Co., confidence in reaching the goal is high.”

Indeed, the proportion of the public intending to receive the vaccine has increased from 60% to 69%, according to data from the Pew Research Center.

But many Americans don’t want the vaccine. Almost…

RCSB Protein Data Bank now has more than 1,000 SARS-CoV-2 proteins

Acknowledgement: Illustration by David S. Goodsell, RCSB Protein Data Bank; doi: 10.2210/rcsb_pdb/goodsell-gallery-026

The RCSB Protein Data Bank has announced that more than 1,000 SARS-CoV-2 proteins are available at no cost.

Headquartered at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, the RCSB Protein Data Bank released its first SARS-CoV-2 structure — the coronavirus main protease (PDB 6lu7) — on Feb. 5, 2020.

The database has helped drive the development of effective COVID-19 vaccines. It continues to shed light on emerging variants of the virus, according to Stephen K. Burley, director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank. “The impact of structural biologists on research related to COVID-19 is a testament to the power of the experimental tools they use and their commitment to making data open access for the public good,” Burley said in a statement.

The database also offers proteins related to other viral…

Ivermectin not supported for mild COVID-19, study says

Ivermectin image courtesy of Wikipedia.

The antiparasitic drug ivermectin does not appear to be an efficacious COVID-19 treatment for mild COVID-19 cases, based on a randomized study recently published in JAMA.

Ivermectin — which is widely used in veterinary medicine to get rid of worms and other parasites— emerged as a potential COVID-19 treatment, owing to its ability to inhibit replication of the SARS-CoV-2 drugin in vitro and animal studies.

Similar research elevated hydroxychloroquine as a potential COVID-19 therapeutic agent, but the drug also has disappointed in human studies. The World Health Organization now cautions against its use as a COVID-19 treatment.

The ivermectin recipients in the Colombian study had a slightly faster resolution of symptoms than the placebo arm. The median time to resolution was 10 days in the ivermectin group versus 12 for placebo recipients. The number of …

How COVID-19 sidelined top vaccine manufacturers

Pfizer, with its partner BioNTech, and Moderna were the first to win emergency use authorization from FDA for COVID-19 vaccines. Johnson & Johnson recently got permission to distribute its vaccine.

But other Big Pharma companies have struggled to get vaccines to the finish line, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Sanofi — among the largest vaccine manufacturers in the world.

While the pandemic offers pharmaceutical companies a unique opportunity to curry favor with the public and politicians, the current dearth of vaccines is partly a result of Big Pharma companies being “missing in action,” according to Zain Rizvi, a pharma-focused researcher at Public Citizen researcher, quoted in Financial Times.

COVID-19 vaccines could be a cash cow for Pfizer and Moderna. The former expects to rake in $15 billion worth of vaccines this year, while Moderna has forecasted $18.4 billion in sales.

Smaller va…