Unless there’s a last-minute meeting of the minds, it looks like any extension of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) five-year intellectual property waiver for COVID-19 vaccines will be shelved, at least for now.
An FDA culture that discourages scientific disagreement with U.S. administration policies may be a perennial problem regardless of the party in power. That’s one of the between-the-lines takeaways from a Jan. 3 letter the Republican leadership of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent to FDA Commissioner Robert Califf – along with a stern warning that the agency had better respond in a timely manner.
SK Bioscience Co. Ltd. and Vaxxas Pty. Ltd. have entered into a joint development agreement that could revolutionize vaccines by developing a vaccine-delivery device combination product using Vaxxas’ high-density microarray patch (HD-MAP) coupled with SK Bioscience’s typhoid vaccine, Skytyphoid.
Even though COVID-19 is transitioning from pandemic to endemic across the world, it will remain first in mind as U.S. lawmakers look to reauthorize the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) this year to ensure the country is better prepared for future threats. With a Sept. 30 deadline for reauthorizing PAHPA, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee has its work cut out for it. But it won’t be starting from scratch. In opening a May 4 hearing on the reauthorization, HELP Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the committee would build on the efforts started last year under then-Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and now-retired Ranking Member Richard Burr (R-N.C.).
With the COVID-19 public health emergency ending in the U.S. next week, Congress is looking to use the lessons learned from the pandemic to draft a new iteration of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act to ensure the country is better prepared for the next pandemic.
The success of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) over the past 20 years is one of the biggest challenges in reaching its goal of eliminating HIV as a global public health threat by 2030, members of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee were told as they moved toward reauthorizing the program for another five years.
During the first round of discussion at its two-day hearing on a World Trade Organization proposal to expand the intellectual property (IP) waiver from COVID-19 vaccines to diagnostics and therapies, the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) got an earful from both sides of the debate.
Any decision on whether to expand a five-year World Trade Organization (WTO) waiver of intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines to diagnostics and therapies likely will be delayed longer than proponents had hoped. WTO members originally were scheduled to vote on expanding the waiver in December, but the deadline was extended indefinitely when key members, including the U.S., pushed for a delay.
Vaxxas Pty. Ltd. raised AU$34 million (US$23 million) to advance its needle-free COVID-19 vaccine program, which began in early November, and readouts from the study are expected in late February or early March, Vaxxas CEO David Hoey told BioWorld. The COVID-19 vaccine patch is based on the company’s high-density microarray patch technology that delivers Hexapro, a second-generation version of the spike protein used in all major U.S.-approved COVID-19 vaccines.
While weekly global and U.S. confirmed cases of COVID-19 are below each of the last two years, infectious disease experts remain on guard. There are still about 1,500 people dying around the world each day, including 350 in the U.S., and the SARS-CoV-2 virus may continue to find ways to outmaneuver current treatments and vaccines.