Mittelstand Santé, a new Franco-German health-tech alliance, has just published its first compilation of feedback from executives of French and German health care companies relating to the COVID pandemic. The French contingent is developing proposals aimed at strengthening the resilience of European health care manufacturing.
A year after the World Health Organization's (WHO) Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response called for reforms to make COVID-19 the last pandemic, the panel remains solidly frustrated in its lack of progress. The WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, emphatically agreed on May 18, saying he was taken aback by data showing COVID-19 cases rose in four out of the six WHO regions just in the past week.
The Biden administration recently reported that a new round of free rapid tests for the SARS-CoV-2 virus is available to the public, a development that coincides with a new surge of the latest sub-variant of the omicron variant. However, the administration is also expected to renew the public health emergency (PHE) for the pandemic, even as the White House continues to press Congress for another $22 billion in pandemic-related funding.
A year after the World Health Organization's (WHO) Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response called for reforms to make COVID-19 the last pandemic, the panel remains solidly frustrated in its lack of progress.
As the COVID-19 pandemic slowly starts to ease globally, efforts are already gearing up to predict the next potential pandemic. One institute researching the increasing number of diseases transmitted from animals to humans is Canada’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, part of the University of Saskatchewan.
Among the policies the U.S. FDA’s device center leveraged for testing during the COVID-19 pandemic was the long-standing enforcement discretion lever, which drew less attention than the agency’s use of emergency use authorizations (EUAs). Nonetheless, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) urged the FDA to develop a formal policy for the use of enforcement discretion for pandemic-related tests, including some metrics for when that discretion would come to an end.
As the COVID-19 pandemic slowly starts to ease globally, efforts are already gearing up to predict the next potential pandemic. One institute researching the increasing number of diseases transmitted from animals to humans is Canada’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, part of the University of Saskatchewan. Now, together with collaborators including the Canadian government, it’s sponsoring a phase II trial of COVAC-2, a squalene-in-water adjuvanted microsphere peptide-based protein subunit vaccine that contains a portion of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
The FDA continues to issue new and revised emergency use authorizations for testing for the COVID-19 pandemic in recent days, including three reissued and four revised EUAs dated March 24.
The bipartisan PREVENT Pandemics Act, which seeks to put into U.S. law many of the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, marked its first milestone March 15, with the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee sending it to the full Senate with a do-pass recommendation on a 20-2 vote.
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit supplies and devices across a broad range of categories over the past two years, and the latest addition to the list is the blood collection tube. The FDA announced that this shortage affects all types of blood collection tubes, thus affecting tubes for all uses, not just those used for testing for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
