HONG KONG – India’s conditional approval on Jan. 3 of a COVID-19 vaccine developed domestically by Bharat Biotech International Ltd. but still in phase III trials has sparked concerns about its safety. The Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) gave emergency authorization to the product, Covaxin, along with the Astrazeneca plc and Oxford University vaccine Covishield. The DCGI said the conditional approval granting “restricted use in emergency situation” for Covaxin was done in “clinical trial mode” to account for the fact that the shot is still being tested. But the rush to approve it has created controversy and confusion.
Moderna has announced that the primary efficacy analysis of the phase III COVE study of mRNA-1273 conducted on 196 cases has confirmed the high efficacy observed at the first interim analysis (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier NCT04470427).
The U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) commitment of up to $483 million to accelerate Moderna Inc.’s mRNA vaccine candidate, mRNA-1273, in efforts to fight coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) would enable the company to supply millions of doses per month in 2020 and tens of millions per month in 2021 if the vaccine candidate is successful in the clinic.
CYBERSPACE – Continuing improvements in HIV treatment and progress toward a cure notwithstanding, an effective vaccine will be necessary to gain the upper hand in the decades-long fight against the pandemic.
MEXICO CITY – Ten years after the RV144 "Thai trial" was the first to show that an effective HIV vaccine was possible, three efficacy trials for HIV vaccines are once again underway.
A research team at the University of New Mexico (UNM), Albuquerque, is moving forward with the development of a vaccine against tauopathies, a neurodegenerative class of diseases that includes Alzheimer's disease, but while promising in the lab, it could take a decade to get an actual vaccine to market.
By now I’ve learned to keep my flu shot habit a secret. Every year about this time, since I was 18 years old, I get vaccinated. But long ago I stopped telling people about it, so I don’t have to hear: “Oh, you know the flu vaccines are made of antifreeze [mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde], right?” or “That’s a crazy thing to do, because the shot itself can make you sick!” or – this one’s fairly new – “You don’t really need it if you’ve got a healthy immune system. Anyway flu shots cause Alzheimer’s [in the old] and autism [in...
Dec. 1 is World AIDS Day, and when I reflect on AIDS, I generally do it with a sense of amazement about how far we have come in the treatment of HIV since AIDS first came to the attention of the U.S. medical establishment, in form of a cluster of pneumocystis pneumonia infections in young men, in 1981. An AIDS-free generation is no longer a pipe dream. With all the progress that’s being made, though, I’ve been struck how one thing that seems to keep receding into the distance – like a manifestation of the joke that the future is...
Viruses are on the border between living and dead. So are the theories about what some of them cause. Two studies were published last week that showed no link between xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) and either chronic fatigue syndrome or prostate cancer. The scientific journals consider the matter settled with these studies. In theirs new sections, Nature and PLoS ONE wrote about “the nail in XMRV’s coffin” and “The Final Chapter on XMRV and Prostate Cancer.” Umm . . . good luck with that. Actually, the link between XMRV and prostate cancer may be laid to rest fairly...
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