COVID-19 vaccine Archives - Page 35 of 38

Several EU nations recommend older adults avoid AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine

Portugal health authorities recently recommended that AstraZeneca’s (LON:AZN) COVID-19 vaccine not be used for those who are over 65.

South Africa recently paused its deployment of the vaccine over worries that it is ineffective against a variant circulating there.

In addition to Portugal, several European countries have expressed reservations about the vaccine’s efficacy in older populations. France, Norway, Germany, Austria and others have decided to only administer the vaccine to those under 65. Poland has reserved the vaccine for those 60 and under, while Spain and Italy have recommended for recipients under 55.

The reservations of the E.U. nations stems in large from a data shortage. Two patients over 65 in the AstraZeneca trial contracted the virus, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions about its efficacy in that age group. There were 660 patients over 65 in the trial.

Portugal has had 765,000 COVID-19 cases and more than 14,000 d…

Facebook cracks down on COVID-19 vaccine misinformation

Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine image courtesy of Wikipedia

Facebook announced today that it would delete unpaid posts with false vaccine information from its service.

The move follows the company’s October decision to eliminate COVID-19 misinformation from its advertising programs.

In December, the company went further, deleting posts with COVID-19 claims that government and health authorities had debunked.

But Facebook had allowed some misinformation to remain on the site, choosing in some cases to make it less visible rather than eliminate it.

Protestors who recently disrupted vaccination efforts at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles had communicated on the social media platform. Vaccine opponents have long used Facebook as a sounding board.

The new policies also extend to Facebook-owned Instagram.

The social media giant has taken steps to combat vaccine misinformation in the past. A…

South Africa pauses rollout of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine

South Africa has scrapped its plans to vaccinate a portion of its population with the COVID-19 vaccine from Oxford University and AstraZeneca (LON:AZN) after a small study showed it was ineffective against a variant widely circulating there.

In the interim, South Africa will rely on vaccines from Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) and Pfizer (NYSE:PFE).

Researchers at Oxford University and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa found the AstraZeneca vaccine to offer little to no protection against mild-to-moderate disease. The research has not been peer-reviewed.

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

Merck to supply lipids to boost Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine production

Merck (NYSE:MRK) announced that it’s expanding its partnership with BioNTech (NSDQ:BNTX) to supply lipids for the Pfizer (NYSE:PFE)/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

The agreement will accelerate the supply of lipids and increase the amount of lipid delivery toward the end of 2021 so they can be used as part of the drug delivery system of mRNA therapies to the body, helping to make the vaccine effective, according to a news release.

Darmstadt, Germany-based Merck said it has worked to expand its already high lipid production capacity as it is currently combining with BioNTech to define exact requirements as they aim for a timely execution of the effort.

“What unites BioNTech and Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, is our strong belief in mRNA technology and our trustful collaboration in vaccine development,” Merck chairman & CEO Stefan Oschmann said in the release. “We are convinced that now is the time to pull together to supply as much vacci…

South Africa pauses rollout of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine

South Africa has scrapped its plans to vaccinate a portion of its population with the COVID-19 vaccine from Oxford University and AstraZeneca (LON:AZN) after a small study showed it was ineffective against a variant widely circulating there.

In the interim, South Africa will rely on vaccines from Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) and Pfizer (NYSE:PFE).

Researchers at Oxford University and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa found the AstraZeneca vaccine to offer little to no protection against mild-to-moderate disease. The research has not been peer-reviewed.

Out of a pool of 748 study participants given the AstraZeneca vaccine, 19 contracted mild or moderate COVID-19 infections compared to 20 people in the placebo group of 714. There were no cases of severe illness in the trial, which did not include elderly participants. The median age in the trial was 31.

Before the recent trial data were announced, the country had amassed 1…

Feds to order 61M more at-home coronavirus tests, build surgical glove factories

Nitrile surgical glove (Image from Cardinal Health)

Just days after ordering 8.5 million at-home tests from Ellume, the Biden administration announced today that it’s in talks with six other at-home coronavirus test manufacturers.

In an online briefing, Tim Manning, the national supply chain coordinator for COVID response, told reporters that these companies could produce another 61 million at-home tests by the end of the summer. Manning declined to identify the manufacturers, citing ongoing contract negotiations, but said more information would be available in the next few weeks.

Get the full story on our sister site, Medical Design & Outsourcing.

Johnson & Johnson applies for vaccine approval from FDA

Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) announced that it submitted an FDA emergency use authorization (EUA) application for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

New Brunswick, N.J.-based J&J’s Janssen Biotech subsidiary submitted the application for its investigational single-dose Janssen COVID-19 vaccine candidate, based on safety and efficacy data from its Phase 3 Ensemble clinical trial that met all of its primary and key secondary endpoints, according to a news release.

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

Johnson & Johnson applies for vaccine approval from FDA

Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) announced that it submitted an FDA emergency use authorization (EUA) application for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

New Brunswick, N.J.-based J&J’s Janssen Biotech subsidiary submitted the application for its investigational single-dose Janssen COVID-19 vaccine candidate, based on safety and efficacy data from its Phase 3 Ensemble clinical trial that met all of its primary and key secondary endpoints, according to a news release.

The company expects to have product available to ship immediately following FDA authorization, as well. Johnson & Johnson set its target to produce 1 billion doses in 2021 and expand production after that. The company has committed to not-for-profit pricing during the pandemic assuming its single-dose vaccine is authorized by FDA and other regulators. J&J is also investigating a two-dose regimen for its vaccine.

READ: Which companies will likely produce the most COVID-19 vaccine i…

Which companies will likely produce the most COVID-19 vaccine in 2021?

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Since the beginning of the pandemic, much of society has pinned its hopes on the availability of a vaccine. Now that several are available across the world, there is hope, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, in a recent JAMA interview. “There’s light at the end of the tunnel.”

One thing that will make the light at the end of the tunnel brighter as we head into the spring is the greater availability of vaccine doses. “The discordance between supply and demand will be diminished,” Fauci said.

The roster of companies producing vaccines is steadily increasing, making it possible to vaccinate a substantial portion of the world’s population this year. (Note: Most of the companies in this list have two-dose vaccines.)

Here’s a roundup of notable companies’ production targets for 2021:

AstraZeneca and Oxford University: Up to 3…

GSK and CureVac team up on COVID-19 vaccine to battle viral variants

Late last year, GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK) and Sanofi (NYSE:SNY) announced that their joint COVID-19 vaccine was delayed.

Now, GlaxoSmithKline is hooking up with Germany-headquartered CureVac (NSDQ:CVAC) to develop a COVID-19 vaccine that can target multiple variants of the virus simultaneously. GSK plans on spending €150 million on the project, paying the first half to CureVac initially and the latter half as a milestone payment.

For GSK, the project also entails a shift in viral platform. Its previous vaccine candidate was an adjuvanted recombinant protein-based COVID-19 vaccine.

The new project, however, will use the mRNA platform that Moderna (NSDQ:MRNA) and Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) have deployed in their vaccines, which were the first to win FDA authorization in the U.S.

The two companies plan to commercially launch an mRNA vaccine in 2022, pending regulatory approval.

GSK will also work with CureVac to produce up to 100 million doses of its …

AstraZeneca vaccine could curb COVID-19 transmission

Hopes for COVID-19 vaccines to beat back the pandemic assumed mass-vaccination would slow viral transmission, and not just prevent moderate-to-severe disease.

Now, early data suggest that AstraZeneca’s (LON:AZN) COVID-19 vaccine, which it jointly developed with Oxford University, can curb viral transmission by up to 67%.

There was more good news from the data. The ChAdOx1 vaccine offered 100% protection against severe disease in a Phase 3 trial. A single vaccine dose offered 76% efficacy between 22 and 90 days after vaccination. Delaying the second dose of vaccine by 12 weeks appeared to boost efficacy to 82%. Efficacy fell to 55% when the gap between doses dropped to less than six weeks.

The study concluded that the U.K.’s strategy of aiming to vaccinate a large proportion of the population with the first dose before administering the second vaccine dose up to 12 weeks later is “an effective strategy.”

Also heartening is the fact that a porti…

UK SARS-COV-2 variant picks up mutation found in Brazil and South Africa

This colorized scanning electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2 (round blue objects), the virus that causes COVID-19, emerging from the surface of cells cultured in the lab. [Image courtesy of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases]

One of the most troubling mutations among SARS-CoV-2 variants is E484K. Found in the highly transmissible variants in Brazil and South Africa, the mutation may diminish vaccine efficacy and pose a higher risk of reinfection than other virus lineages.

Now, the mutation has appeared spontaneously in Kent, Bristol and Liverpool in the U.K.

The trend is the latest evidence that the E484K mutation provides an evolutionary advantage for the novel coronavirus and that several COVID-19 variants have a similar evolutionary trajectory.

Researchers from South Africa have concluded that the E484K mutation results in a substantial reduction in the efficacy of a…