LONDON – Astrazeneca plc is to get up to $1.2 billion from the new U.S. COVID-19 vaccines program, Operation Warp Speed, to support further development and manufacturing of a vaccine developed at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute. The company said it will begin to ship the product in September 2020, with the U.K. and U.S. first in line for deliveries.

Moderna Inc.’s chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, said that the results in hand “give us great confidence that we've got the right dose range for phase III” work slated to begin this summer with COVID-19 vaccine prospect mRNA-1273. A regulatory filing could come as early as 2021.

“Our window of opportunity is closing. If we fail to develop a national coordinated response, based in science, I fear the pandemic will get far worse and be prolonged, causing unprecedented illness and fatalities,” Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, said today as he testified at a House subcommittee hearing on the U.S. response to COVID-19.

LONDON – Geopolitical tensions over the issue of access to COVID-19 vaccines intensified this week, after the CEO of French pharmaceutical company Sanofi SA said the U.S. government would get first access to its product because it was first to fund the research.

CAJICA, Colombia – Previous research to develop vaccines for dengue and Zika virus could become the cornerstone for a vaccine against COVID-19, which the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) is working on.

LONDON – Support is growing for human challenge trials in COVID-19 to be approved in order to speed up development of effective vaccines against the pandemic infection. The World Health Organization (WHO) has just released guidelines for assessing the ethical acceptability, saying such trials would allow for more rapid and standardized testing, accelerating development and enabling candidates to be prioritized.

The May 12 Senate hearing regarding the COVID-19 pandemic included the usual conversations about contact tracing, but Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he is “cautiously optimistic” that one of the vaccines currently in trial in the U.S. will work, but that it is unlikely a vaccine will be ready by September 2020. In contrast, Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir said testing capacity may reach 50 million tests per month by that time, thanks in part to the fact that antigen testing is now part of the FDA’s emergency use authorization mechanism.

LONDON – Support is growing for human challenge trials in COVID-19 to be approved in order to speed up development of effective vaccines against the pandemic infection.

In the rush to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, integral parts of the equation are being overlooked in the U.S., according to a whistleblower complaint filed this week by Rick Bright over his removal as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). Even if millions of doses of vaccine are ready to go by January, as the NIH’s Anthony Fauci a few weeks ago said could happen, there may not be enough needles and syringes to deliver those doses.