The calendar of vaccine deliveries and the state of the art on updated vaccines
There is an agreement between the European Commission and Moderna on deliveries of Covid vaccines for next autumn. Here's what it includes in detail and what the latest updates on Omicron-adapted vaccines are
The European Commission and the US pharmaceutical company Moderna have reached an agreement to reschedule the deliveries of vaccines in September and in the autumn period. It was indeed necessary to make changes to the previous calendar.
THE AGREEMENT
The agreement between the EU and Modern Commission has established that the doses originally planned for the summer will now be delivered in September and during the autumn and winter period of 2022, when countries will need them most for vaccination campaigns.
For the Commissioner for Health, Stella Kyriakides, "the increase in vaccination against Covid-19 and the recall rates will be essential and to best guarantee our common preparation, the Member States must have the necessary tools". "The agreement – he added – will ensure that Member States have access to the doses of vaccines they need in time to protect citizens".
VACCINES ADAPTED TO OMICRON
The agreement also guarantees EU states 15 million additional recalls adapted to the Omicron variant, subject to marketing authorization by the European Medicines Agency (Ema) and the EU Commission.
"The agreement – explained the EU Commission – guarantees that, if one or more adapted vaccines receive marketing authorization, the Member States can choose to receive the adapted vaccines under the current contract".
THE STATE OF THE ART ON UPDATED VACCINES
For months , pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna in particular, have been running to update their vaccines, which in front of Omicron have partially lost their effectiveness. The EMA, according to reports from its head of vaccine strategy, Marco Cavaleri, plans to give the green light to the vaccines updated in September.
Moderna has submitted to the European Agency a bivalent vaccine created with the original strain of the virus ( wild-type , already used for current vaccines) and Omicron 1 inside, but is also working on a second candidate based on the strains of Omicron 4 and 5.
Pfizer and BioNTech, on the other hand, are developing three updated vaccines: two similar to those of Moderna and another created only with Omicron 1. The one designed for Omicron 4 and 5 still seems a mirage, in fact, the experimentation has not even started and the two companies have announced that they will begin clinical trials this month with the aim of rolling them out no earlier than October.
The rush of the pharmaceutical companies, however, clashes with the reality of the virus which is much faster and more changeable and therefore we continue to wonder if it makes sense to chase it because, as Cavaleri said: "We are obviously not able to know which variant will circulate in Europe in autumn ".
THE RESULTS OF MODERNA
Moderna is definitely ahead of Pfizer / BioNTech and, in fact, on 11 July announced that its bivalent vaccine "elicited significantly higher neutralizing antibody responses against Omicron's BA.4 and BA.5 sub-variants than the currently authorized booster. ".
The "superior magnitude and duration of the immune response after a bivalent booster has been demonstrated in multiple Phase 2/3 studies involving thousands of participants," specified Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/il-calendario-delle-consegne-dei-vaccini-e-lo-stato-dellarte-sui-vaccini-aggiornati/ on Thu, 11 Aug 2022 05:28:30 +0000.