January is historically the weakest month of the year for FDA approvals and 2021 is following that trend. With only nine approvals tracked by BioWorld during the month, it falls short of the 12 approvals during the same month in 2020, and it is the lowest amount in a single month since January of 2019, which also recorded nine.

Tonix Pharmaceuticals Holding Corp. is looking to lessons from tuberculosis and smallpox to guide its future in infectious diseases. The company is developing an intradermal skin test like that used for TB to measure T-cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. It also has three vaccines in development for COVID-19 that rely on horsepox, likely the form of vaccinia used by Edward Jenner to create the smallpox vaccine.

The U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee needed two days of hearings to get through a spending measure that provided the FDA with $500 million for its part in the government response. The CDC would receive $7.5 billion for vaccine distribution and tracking, all developments that ran parallel to an announcement that another 200 million doses of vaccine will be delivered by the end of July at a cost of $3.7 billion.

COLOMBIA – South Korea’s molecular diagnostics firm Seegene Inc. is expanding operations in the Brazilian market after Anvisa, the country's health care surveillance agency, cleared its multi-assay product through a COVID-19 emergency pathway. Seegene manufactures Allplex, a SARS-CoV-2/FluA/FluB/RSV test able to screen and differentiate eight targets.