![]() Instead, it sank $2 billion into its own development efforts and refused Warp Speed handouts. Pfizer, by contrast, was playing catch-up and decided that it didn’t want to be hamstrung by government bureaucracy. Moderna was forced to push back the start date of its Phase 3 trial by several weeks, from July 9 to July 27, because of protocol changes demanded by the Warp Speed team. ![]() I quickly learned that these negotiations were often contentious and sometimes protracted. Operation Warp Speed, a joint effort of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense, began to come together the following month and promised pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars to fund the manufacture of vaccines before any had even proved effective in large-scale Phase 3 trials.Īs a term of these investments, any company taking Warp Speed money would have to plan its Phase 3 clinical trials with the input of scientists from the NIH and other agencies. By the time the two companies joined forces in March, a rival product, developed by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health, had already been given to the first participants in a Phase 1 safety trial. In January of that year, the company turned down a chance to help its German partner, BioNTech, develop an mRNA vaccine for the emerging coronavirus disease, figuring that the outbreak would burn out on its own, as many such outbreaks do. Pfizer’s first decision, in early 2020, was to sit things out. In reporting my forthcoming book on the COVID-19 vaccine race, I never got the sense that Pfizer had cut any unnecessary corners, but I knew that the story for all the companies had been one of compromise, of making the least-bad decisions in the shortest time possible. Is it possible that Pfizer, in its all-out sprint to bring the first-ever human mRNA vaccine to market, ended up delivering the second-best product? Shane Crotty, a researcher at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, told me that after looking at some of the recent data, he went to double-check his own vaccination record and was pleased to find Moderna listed on it. “It’s very hard to compare two very effective interventions.” Other experts see the evidence of a difference, however slight, starting to grow. “All of the real-world evidence you have to take with caution,” Pfizer’s chief scientific officer, Mikael Dolsten, told me recently. ![]() Recipients of Moderna’s shots, after all, may also need a booster eventually. Pfizer’s shots remain highly protective against hospitalization, but the latest numbers from the CDC suggest that their effectiveness has dropped from 87 percent to 80 percent during the Delta wave, while that of Moderna’s shots remains in the 90s.Īlthough Pfizer has now sold authorities around the world on the imminent need for third shots to combat waning immunity, the company doesn’t believe that its vaccine, worth more than $30 billion to its bottom line, is inferior in any way to competitors. Compared with Moderna’s competing shot, Pfizer’s vaccine seems to induce half the amount of virus-fighting antibodies, and is associated with nearly twice as many breakthrough infections, according to two recent studies. Trump projected that the coronavirus vaccine would be available to everyone by April, exceeding “any and all expectations.The Delta variant’s arrival this summer delivered a blow to the nation’s entire coronavirus arsenal, but its impact on the champion of last year’s vaccine race-Pfizer-has been particularly humbling. Health organizations often use such market guarantees to encourage for-profit manufacturers to supply vaccines in developing countries.īEHIND PFIZER'S VACCINE, AN UNDERSTATED HUSBAND-AND-WIFE DREAM TEAM However, the deal offered a strong incentive. Instead, the money will go toward the manufacturing and distribution of the vaccine. The money was part of an advance-purchase agreement, meaning Pfizer did not accept government money for vaccine development, unlike other frontrunners Moderna and Astrazeneca. In July, Pfizer struck a $1.95 billion deal with the federal government as part of Operation Warp Speed, in an effort to deliver 100 million doses of the vaccine. Trump said that the vaccine will be provided by Pfizer free of charge. PFIZER-BIONTECH CORONAVIRUS VACCINE EXPECTED TO PROTECT PATIENTS FOR A YEAR: CEO Food and Drug Administration by the third week of November. Earlier this week, Pfizer and BioNTech said clinical data showed their COVID-19 vaccine candidate to be 90% effective and that they could file for emergency use authorization with U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |