Considered one of the few ways to finally bring the pandemic under control, the search for a COVID-19 vaccine is moving fast.
Teams around the world are at work on dozens of potential vaccines in the hopes that one of them — and possibly more — will crack the code in the coming months; passing clinical testing and gaining regulatory approval.
Thousands of people are already rolling up their sleeves for clinical testing, while debates are underway about issues such as who should get a vaccine first. How will it be distributed? How do we make sure parts of the world aren’t left out?
From the spotlight Pfizer’s promising results have put on the looming distribution problem, to the homegrown candidate looking to start testing on volunteers coast to coast, and the question of how many doses is too many for Canadians — here are the big stories from the past week.
Pfizer results shine a spotlight on distribution challenges
The week began with a splash of major vaccine news, when Pfizer Inc. revealed an early look at its testing data Monday morning, numbers that suggest its candidate, developed alongside German company BioNTech, could be as much as 90 per cent effective.
There are caveats — the data hasn’t been published yet, and the trial isn’t even complete. That said, as Dr. Lynora Saxinger, an infectious disease expert at the University of Alberta, put it: “There have been good early signs from many other vaccine trials, but this is a larger data set with more results in more people.
“It kind of switched me over from theoretical optimism to just optimism.”
The news, encouraging though it is, has put a spotlight on one of the rapidly approaching hurdles on the road to a vaccine: distributing it to Canadians.
Transport of a vaccine that will likely be needed in every corner of the country was always going to be an issue, but the Pfizer vaccine, if it is approved, comes with an additional set of challenges. It uses what’s called RNA, which are basically tiny recipes that prompt your body to make its own spike proteins, which, in theory, teach your immune system to fight off future coronavirus infections.
It’s a new technology, and one experts consider very promising, but also one that comes with a major drawback: It must be stored at temperatures as cold as -80 C.
The so-called cold-chain requirements mean any eventual distribution plan will require refrigerated trucks and warehouses that some say we don’t have yet. A government tender is currently seeking a company that could transport them packed in dry ice.
One of the other front-runner candidates, the one made by an American company named Moderna, also uses RNA, and its testing results are expected in the coming weeks.
While we still need to see if either will receive Health Canada approval, refrigeration is bound to be a big headache for distribution going forward.
Pfizer CEO sells stock after news
The other nugget of news to come out of Monday’s announcment was the revelation that the company CEO cashed out $5.6 million of stock the same day.
While the news has raised questions about who stands to benefit from the development of new vaccines, CEO Albert Bourla has said the sale was part of a “personal financial planning” strategy he’d authorized months earlier, according to Business Insider.
Canadian-made vaccine to expand testing across the country
While it was Pfizer that made the biggest headlines this week, the only Canadian-made vaccine currently in clinical trials hit a major milestone of its own.
Quebec-based Medicago released some results from the first stage of testing this week — which found that its candidate was able to produce an immune response without serious side effects — and announced plans to go ahead with a combined Phase 2 and 3 trial starting next week, which will seek to enrol volunteers at a handful sites across this country.
In a vaccine race currently dominated by front-runners from the U.S., Europe and Asia, Medicago is the furthest along homegrown candidate. Apart from a few specialized trials on people with specific medical conditions, Medicago is also currently running the only general COVID-19 vaccine trial in the country.
Last month, the federal government gave the company $173 million to supply as many as 76 million doses of its vaccine — should it be successful — and to build a manufacturing facility in Quebec City.
The expanded trial, which has already been greenlit by Health Canada, will see Medicago’s plant-based experimental vaccine tested on Canadian volunteers. The existing study is happening in Quebec, but the company plans to add sites near Toronto, in the Maritimes and on the West Coast.
According to Nathalie Landry, Medicago’s executive vice-president of scientific and medical affairs, there is value to having a Canadian-made vaccine in development.
“This is still the best way countries have found to make sure that vaccine will be available for their population, is to have manufacturing capacity in their country,” she said.
The Medicago candidate is also taking a unique approach — the company is using a cousin of a tobacco plant to grow what are called “viruslike particles,” which trick your body into thinking they’re the coronavirus and thus mustering an immune response.
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“It will self assemble in a way that it will look, under an electron microscope, like the virus. It’s pretty similar, but it’s not the virus, it’s not infectious, it cannot replicate or induce any disease,” Landry said.
Is Canada taking too much of the potential global vaccine supply?
As the race for a COVID-19 vaccine gets ever closer to a finish line, deep-pocketed countries around the world have locked down doses for their own citizens, a move dubbed “vaccine nationalism” and criticized by many in the global community.
New numbers from the Duke Global Health Innovation Centre suggest that, when adjusted for population, the country currently sitting atop the biggest pile is Canada.
The Centre’s Launch and Scale Speedometer, which gathers data on health interventions around the world, posted new numbers this week that say high-income countries currently have a total of 3.4 billion doses reserved.
Assuming that every leading vaccine candidate is approved, which is a stretch, Canada, with 358 million doses locked down, has enough to vaccine the entire population five times. (Canada has roughly 37.6 million people, and if everyone needed two shots, it would take just over 75 million doses to innoculate the whole country.)
That’s more coverage per person than any other country in the world.
It’s also almost three quarters of the 500 million doses currently locked down by COVAX, the global vaccine-sharing scheme that Canada has poured millions of dollars in funding into.
Canadian officials have maintained it’s their job to make sure Canadians have access to doses. That said, they’ve also said they’re committed to COVAX and to making sure that, when the time comes, poorer countries aren’t left out.
Karina Gould, Canada’s minister of international development, told the Star in September that vaccine companies had already committed certain doses to COVAX, so it’s not a matter of Canada’s orders being first in line.
“Canada’s position is that we expect vaccines to be affordable, accessible and equitable around the world,” she said.
Will an eventual vaccine work for seniors?
There’s no question older adults have borne the brunt of the pandemic, with the majority of deaths occurring in those over 65.
Yet most new drugs and vaccines are developed in younger healthy adults, prompting experts to warn that Health Canada needs to ensure these new candidates will be effective for everyone, including older people, who arguably will need them most.
Vaccine makers say they’re rising to the challenge.
Dr. Wilbur Chen, chief of the adult clinical section at the Centre for Vaccine Development at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, says you should think of these new trials like accordions — instead of going step by step, manufacturers are able to do a bunch of tests at the same time, including on older adults.
“We can't just wait for perfect results in perfect studies because it would take that much longer,” he told the Star.
“But what is good about the studies that we’re doing is that we’re trying, as best possible, to have all parts of the population involved, which means that we’re having racial and ethnic diversity built in, we’re having age diversity built in, we are trying to do it all throughout different geographic locations as well.”
https://news.google.com/__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?oc=5
2020-11-14 14:01:16Z
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