First day of September and the winners of all the vaccine races do not think about giving their competitors a break. The European Medicines Agency approved this Thursday, the use of the new vaccines adapted to Omicron from Pfizer and Moderna, which will be used in the Member States as a booster dose.
Both vaccines have achieved European endorsement before their most direct rivals. Sanofi is still waiting for the yes after spending several months in the waiting room for approval. Similarly, Pfizer and Moderna are also ahead of Hipra, who is still responding to technical questions raised by the Agency.
The other news that came out of the agency located in Amsterdam is the endorsement of the Novavax vaccine to also be used as a booster. To date, in Spain this vaccine has had a residual use, since Health only recommended it for those people who had allergies to messenger RNA sera. In fact, in the weekly reports sent by the Ministry, it does not even appear in the count of inoculated vaccines. In any case, it has the European backing to also compete with both Sanofi and Hipra as well as Moderna and Pfizer.
In Spain, the Minister of Health already announced a few days ago that the new vaccination campaign scheduled for autumn will be carried out for those over 80 years of age. This population group will begin to be vaccinated this month and will do so with the adapted vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer.
court battle
The decisions of the European Medicines Agency and the FDA arrive. Last week, Moderna sued the Pfizer-BionTech alliance for copying the vaccine’s patent. After requesting legal proceedings, the other two companies dismissed the action as opportunistic due to the success of their vaccine, in addition to considering the lawsuit as meaningless. Beyond the economic issues that may arise from the litigation, there is also the risk of a decision that prevents commercialization.
Moderna alleges in its lawsuits that Pfizer and Biontech had several paths to develop their vaccine and that, nevertheless, they decided to copy them. “They took four different vaccine candidates to clinical trials, which included options that would have strayed away from Moderna’s innovative pathway. However, Pfizer and BioNTech ultimately decided to proceed with a vaccine that has the same mRNA chemical modification as Moderna’s vaccine. “, they say.
As the two big winners in the coronavirus vaccine business face off in a court battle, rivals are rushing their options to get to this fall’s campaign on time. In spite of everything, the first race has already fallen on the part of the American pharmaceutical companies, which will begin to supply the European countries (and the USA) with their new serums to begin the revaccination of the population.
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