Govt starts talks with Pfizer, days after early Covid-19 vaccine data
Coronavirus (COVID-19) Vaccine: Pfizer and BioNTech had released the phase 1 data last Thursday and said they are “on track” to seek regulatory review as early as in October 2020.
In India, sources said, Pfizer does not have any agreement with the government “as of now” or identified any manufacturing facility. (File)
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The government has held an “initial meeting” with representatives of US-based Pfizer’s Indian subsidiary days after the global pharma giant released the early phase 1 data of its vaccine candidate for the novel coronavirus that, it said, demonstrated a strong immune response.
“We are in contact with Pfizer India. We have had an initial meeting,” top government sources told The Indian Express.
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Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, a biotechnology company, had released the phase 1 data last Thursday and said they are “on track” to seek regulatory review as early as in October 2020.
So far, the pharma major has identified five facilities across the globe, including in the US and Germany, to manufacture the vaccine. In India, sources said, Pfizer does not have any agreement with the government “as of now” or identified any manufacturing facility.
Sources said, however, that there is the possibility of a “fill and finish” option. “We have to see how it evolves. They are also actively looking around,” they said. In the process of “fill and finish”, manufacturers use third parties to fill vials with the vaccine and complete the packaging process.
The Pfizer vaccine candidate —BNT162b2 — is currently in phase 3 of human trials in the US. It is made of a short segment of genetic material, which provides instructions to human cells to make harmless versions of a target protein — in this case, the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 — to activate an immune response.
Pfizer has said it will manufacture up to 100 million doses of the vaccine by the end of 2020 and potentially more than 1.2 billion doses by the end of 2021. It has so far announced agreements to supply the vaccine to a number of countries, including the UK, US, Japan and Canada.
On Wednesday, India began phase 2 trials of a separate Oxford University vaccine candidate with the first doses given to a set of six volunteers at Pune’s Bharati Vidyapeeth medical college and hospital. This candidate, which is being developed by Bharat Biotech and Zydus Cadila, is in phase 1-2 of clinical trials.
Kaunain Sheriff M is an award-winning investigative journalist and the National Health Editor at The Indian Express. He is the author of Johnson & Johnson Files: The Indian Secrets of a Global Giant, an investigation into one of the world’s most powerful pharmaceutical companies.
With over a decade of experience, Kaunain brings deep expertise in three areas of investigative journalism: law, health, and data. He currently leads The Indian Express newsroom’s in-depth coverage of health.
His work has earned some of the most prestigious honours in journalism, including the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) Award, and the Mumbai Press Club’s Red Ink Award.
Kaunain has also collaborated on major global investigations. He was part of the Implant Files project with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which exposed malpractices in the medical device industry across the world. He also contributed to an international investigation that uncovered how a Chinese big-data firm was monitoring thousands of prominent Indian individuals and institutions in real time.
Over the years, he has reported on several high-profile criminal trials, including the Hashimpura massacre, the 2G spectrum scam, and the coal block allocation case. Within The Indian Express, he has been honoured three times with the Indian Express Excellence Award for his investigations—on the anti-Sikh riots, the Vyapam exam scam, and the abuse of the National Security Act in Uttar Pradesh. ... Read More
