Last week, President Biden announced a new COVID-19 vaccine commitment to the world. In addition, Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate met the primary endpoint in its Phase 3 trial. Please see details for these and other supply chain developments below:
- On June 10, President Biden announced that the U.S. will purchase an additional half-billion doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to donate to nearly 100 low- and lower-middle-income countries. These doses will start to be shipped in August; 200 million will be delivered in 2021, and 300 million more in the first half of 2022.
- On June 10, Moderna announced that it had requested an FDA emergency use authorization (EUA) for its COVID-19 vaccine in adolescents.
- On June 11, the G7 and guest countries (G7+) announced their joint commitment to provide more than 1 billion additional COVID-19 vaccines to the world. In addition, the G7+ committed to increasing investments in local production capacity for COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, raw materials, diagnostics, and medical supplies.
- On June 11, the FDA announced that it had cleared two batches of the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine drug substance manufactured at the Emergent BioSolutions Baltimore facility as suitable for use. The agency also determined that several other batches were not suitable for use, involving, according to a New York Times article, about 60 million doses. The agency was not ready to authorize the facility for the Janssen vaccine EUA but was reviewing individual batches manufactured there for release. We reported on the Emergent facility’s quality issue with the Janssen vaccine in an earlier issue.
- On June 14, Novavax announced that its COVID-19 vaccine candidate had met the primary endpoint in its pivotal Phase 3 trial, demonstrating 90% overall efficacy and 100% protection against moderate and severe disease.
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