COVID-19 vaccines Archives - Page 24 of 24

Amazon offers to help Biden administration with vaccine distribution

Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) issued a letter to recently inaugurated President Joe Biden offering assistance with COVID-19 vaccine distribution.

President Biden, who was sworn into office yesterday, was addressed in the letter from Amazon announcing its availability to help with his intent to distribute 100 million COVID-19 vaccine doses in his first 100 days in office.

The letter congratulated Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on their inauguration and said that its more than 800,000 U.S. employees — most of whom are classified as “essential workers” amid the pandemic — should receive the approved vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna as soon as possible.

“The essential employees working at Amazon fulfillment centers, AWS data centers and Whole Foods Market stores across the country who cannot work from home should receive the COVID-19 vaccine at the earliest appropriate time,” Amazon CEO, Worldwide Consumer, Dave Clark wrote.

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Biden’s COVID-19 response will make manufacturers busy

[Image courtesy of Biden for President]

Manufacturers of vaccine supplies and personal protective equipment can expect more work as the new Biden administration rolls out its plans to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

In one of his first official acts as president, Joe Biden announced a plan to “fully use” the Defense Production Act to ramp up production of testing supplies, masks, face shields and other PPE, with an eye toward boosting American manufacturing to reduce reliance on other countries. The president also announced his intention to invest $25 billion in a vaccine manufacturing and distribution plan that will provide vaccines to all Americans, free of charge.

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

How to make COVID-19 clinical trial statistics meaningful to the public

[Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash]

COVID-19 has brought a newly heightened awareness of the need to better understand clinical trial statistics and their direct impact on the public. I cannot remember when statistical data was more in the limelight than now. The pandemic’s first wave put many countries into lockdown. All governments and their local representatives delivered press conferences regularly to update the masses on the newest statistics and safety precautions. There were statistics on how many people caught the disease, how many deaths, how many ICU beds were still available, and just about every interesting statistic you could think of related to the pandemic.

Data collected from the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be used to inform decisions and make future projections related to drug development and beyond. Individuals are also using pandemic statistics to decide how to live th…

Cybercriminals manipulated COVID-19 vaccine files before sharing them

Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine image courtesy of Wikipedia

The perpetrators of a cyberattack against the European Medicines Agency found and later released data regarding the COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) and BioNTech (NSDQ:BNTX).

But the cybercriminals altered the data in a manner that could undermine trust in vaccines, according to a statement from the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

The disclosed documents included internal emails from late 2020 that contained information about the regulation of COVID-19 vaccines in Europe.

The breach also involved PowerPoint, PDF and Word documents and peer review comments from EMA.

A post containing a link to the manipulated documents has been posted on the dark web with the title, “Astonishing fraud! Evil Pfffizer! Fake vaccines!”

Another thread posting links to the modified files stated they were evidence of a “big data scam.”

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U.S. government stockpile of COVID-19 vaccines already drained

Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine image courtesy of Wikipedia

Last week, President-elect Joe Biden vowed to release COVID-19 vaccine doses from a government stockpile.

On Jan. 13, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) echoed that sentiment, stating it would “no longer stockpile millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses held to ensure Americans receive their second shot,” according to a brief notice.

But federal officials had already drained vaccine reserves before the HHS vowed to open up a vaccine stockpile, according to state officials who had been expecting more doses.

Local government officials expecting vaccine supplies to roughly double starting next week are now forced to contend with the status quo.

Critics of Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership established by the Trump administration to support COVID-19 vaccine distribution, have been frustrated with the speed …

Former FDA commissioner Kessler to help lead Biden’s COVID-19 response

Dr. David Kessler, former FDA commissioner and incoming chief scientific officer of the Biden administration’s COVID-19 response [Photo by Justin Hoch, CC BY 2.0]

President-elect Joe Biden today announced that Dr. David Kessler, who led FDA through much of the 1990s, will serve as chief science officer of his administration’s COVID-19 response.

Kessler’s achievements at FDA included speeding the approval of drugs to reduce the AIDS death toll. He’ll now be helping to lead efforts to speed authorization and delivery of vaccines to bring the COVID-19 pandemic under control — as well as an overall, comprehensive, whole-of-government COVID-19 response.

“We are in a race against time, and we need a comprehensive strategy to quickly contain this virus,” Biden said in announcing the appointment of Kessler and other new members of the COVID-19 response team.

Kessler has alr…

Biden vows to ramp up COVID-19 vaccine distribution with $1.9T stimulus package

[Joe Biden photo from Wikipedia]

President-elect Joe Biden has announced a proposal for a $1.9 trillion economic rescue package that includes $415 billion to fight the pandemic, including boosting COVID-19 vaccine deployment. Of that latter total, some $20 billion would be invested in a national vaccination program to establish community vaccination centers across the country, including mobile vaccination units in rural areas. Another $30 billion would cover supplies and personal protective equipment.

The possibility of a Senate trial in Biden’s first 100 days in office could be a roadblock for the plan.

Nevertheless, Biden aims to have 100 million COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in his first 100 days in office.

Biden’s plan also earmarks $50 billion for COVID-19 testing and would strengthen the nation’s use of genomic testing to track SARS-CoV-2 mutations.

To date, there have bee…

8 hurdles related to COVID-19 vaccine distribution

Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine image courtesy of Wikipedia

While vaccines remain the most powerful tool in achieving herd immunity for COVID-19, mass-vaccination has thus far proven more challenging than anticipated in many parts of the world. There are expected challenges, such as dealing with the subarctic storage requirements (–112º to –76º F) of the BNT162b2 vaccine from Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) and BioNTech (NSDQ:BNTX). But the vaccine rollout is posing a series of challenges, many of which have been hard to anticipate.

1. Lack of standardization

One factor slowing COVID-19 vaccine distribution is confusion. “One of our biggest challenges right now is just lack of standardization across the U.S.,” said Marsha Flores Harris, product manager for FDB Prizm, a knowledge base platform from privately-held First Databank.

Not only is there variability in the storage requirements for the vaccines likely to be used in …