BioNTech Annual General Meeting Vaccine effective against mutants

Status: 06/22/2021 6:13 p.m.

BioNTech boss Sahin uses the vaccine manufacturer’s general meeting to spread good news: Production will be increased and the vaccine also protects against virus variants. In view of the growing spread of the delta variant of the coronavirus, which is considered to be more dangerous, many people are wondering how the effectiveness of the various vaccines is doing in this regard. At today’s Annual General Meeting, CEO Ugur Sahin gave the all-clear for BioNTech’s product: “There is currently no evidence that our vaccine needs to be adapted to the variants in circulation,” he said. That does not mean that the company is stopping development: According to Sahin, BioNTech is working on flexible processes in the areas of technology, production and approval.

Constant analysis

In order to be prepared and to be able to react quickly if a third dose should be required to boost existing vaccinations or to adapt to a new virus strain, BioNTech constantly analyzes the effectiveness of the vaccine against newly emerging variants, the CEO explained.

Sahin also commented on the subject of booster vaccinations: It is not yet known when and how often a booster will be necessary. But he assumes “that a third vaccination is of great value for boosting immunity,” said Sahin. Knowledge about the corona virus is steadily increasing. “We observe that immunity will decrease over time and new variants will emerge.”

Sahin against patent release

The one raised by US President Joe Biden and other politicians Request for the release of patents to enable license-free vaccine production in developing countries, the BioNTech boss rejected. It is important to be able to make the vaccine available worldwide “as quickly and as comprehensively as possible”. However, raw materials are currently the “limiting factor”, not patents.

BioNTech is working with partners to deliver the vaccine cheaply to developing countries. However, a patent release would not bring additional amounts of vaccine. The production of the vaccine is very complex and consists of around 50,000 work steps.

Production is increased

During the Annual General Meeting, Sahin also commented on production: The BioNTech boss confirmed that the company, together with its US partner Pfizer, is aiming for a production capacity of up to three billion vaccine doses this year.

In the coming year 2022 it should be more than three billion. BioNTech will manufacture at least half of this. To date, BioNTech and Pfizer have shipped more than 700 million doses of their Covid-19 vaccine to over 100 countries worldwide.

Dividend is possible

The shareholders should also benefit from the billions in sales generated with the corona vaccine. Chief Financial Officer Sierk Poetting said that in the next financial year it should be checked whether and in what amount a dividend is possible.

However, the strategic priority for 2021 is the reinvestment of the capital in order to further advance innovations in various therapeutic areas and technologies as well as our corporate development, said Poetting. The Mainz biotechnology company achieved a net profit of 1.1 billion euros on sales of 2.05 billion euros in the first quarter of this year .

New production facilities

There was also news from BioNTech outside of the Annual General Meeting. The European Medicines Agency’s Committee on Medicinal Products for Human Use gives the go-ahead for two more production facilities to manufacture the joint corona vaccine from Biontech and Pfizer.

One becomes accordingly in Reinbek, Schleswig-Holstein, operated by Allergopharma, the parent company of Dermapharm , the other in the Swiss stone from Novartis Pharma. The work can be started immediately, since no approval from the EU Commission is required

Corona vaccine study Novavax is 90 percent effective

Status: 14.06.2021 2:21 p.m. According to preliminary study data, the corona vaccine from the US pharmaceutical manufacturer Novavax is safe and highly effective – even with virus variants. The product raises great hopes, especially in developing countries. According to the US pharmaceutical company, the Novavax corona vaccine protects well against the virus and its variants. The company said that the vaccine was around 90 percent effective and, according to preliminary data from a study, safe. The vaccine effectiveness study involved nearly 30,000 people in the United States and Mexico. Two-thirds of them received two doses of the vaccine three weeks apart, all others received placebos. A total of 77 people were infected with the coronavirus, 14 of them in the group of those who were vaccinated. Of the participants who received the drug, none developed severe or moderate symptoms, while there were 14 in the comparison group without vaccination.

background 06/14/2021

No cases of blood clots or heart problems

The vaccine was similarly effective against several variants of the coronavirus, including the alpha variant first discovered in the UK, as well as in high-risk groups such as the elderly and people with pre-existing conditions. The side effects were similar to those of other vaccines and mainly concerned pain at the injection site. There have been no reports of blood clots or heart problems, said Novavax boss Stanley Erck. Novavax plans to publish the results in a medical journal where they will be reviewed by independent experts.

Vaccine important for developing countries

The company said that applications for approval would be submitted in the USA and Europe, among others, by the end of September. Until then, a production of 100 million cans per month is possible. Novavax’s vaccine is easy to transport and store, which is why it is expected to play an important role in vaccination campaigns in developing countries. “Many of our first doses will go to low- and middle-income countries, and that was the goal from the start,” said Erck. Novavax’s vaccine works in a similar way to flu vaccines. It is made with laboratory-grown copies of the spike protein that envelops the coronavirus. The immune system reacts to the proteins in the vaccine and is thus prepared when it is actually confronted with the virus. Other vaccines that are widely used today contain the genetic instructions for the body to make its own spike protein.

02.03.2021

The warehouse was converted into an isolation area for infected people during the 1918 flu pandemic. Photo: According to Live Science “The research results, although not directly applicable to the Covid-19 pandemic, show that humans can eventually overcome their variants. This is being expected by the world in the context of the corona virus outbreak. evolved with many dangerous mutations today,” evolutionary biologist Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer, lead author of the study, told Live Science. According to Spencer, as now, when focusing on studying the virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic, the research team questioned whether its new variants worked differently from the original? Since then, the team has studied six human lungs dating from the pandemic years of 1918, which are preserved in formalin at pathological archives in Germany and Austria. The researchers determined that three of the six sample lungs – two from young soldiers who died in Berlin, the other from a young woman who died in Munich – contained the 1918 flu virus. “The virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic is still around today. But it’s more attenuated, mainly because we are descendants of people who survived the outbreak 103 years ago. Because So we’ve inherited some form of genetic immunity,” explains Calvignac-Spencer. Estimates suggest that the 1918 strain of influenza infected about 1 billion people, while the global population was only 2 billion. About 50-100 million people may have died in three consecutive outbreaks then. The first wave of the pandemic occurred in early 1918, it was less deadly than later waves: “The preserved lungs of two German soldiers were determined to be dead at this time”, the research team at the Institute of Robert Koch confirmed. The researchers extracted viral RNA from those lung samples. Both German soldiers died on the same day and when decoding the genome of the virus that killed them there was almost no difference. Spencer added: “But the form of the flu virus found in the soldiers’ lungs, is somewhat genetically different from the form of the virus that infected the young woman who died in Munich. Presumably, the woman. did not survive a subsequent outbreak.” The scientists also compared viral genomes from the US and Germany, and conducted laboratory studies with synthetic copies of virus samples. They wanted to learn to assess the infectivity and replication ability of different strains inside cells. The findings of German scientists also show that the 1918 flu virus has mutated to make the next outbreak stronger and more dangerous than the previous one, by evolving to overcome the human ability to “defence”. The genetic mutations that emerged between the first and second waves may have made the virus better adapted for human-to-human transmission, rather than between birds, its natural host. The other mutation may have changed the way the virus interacts with a human protein called MxA, which helps regulate the body’s immune response to new pathogens. Although the scientists are not sure how the variants changed the “strength” of the virus, “it can be predicted that these changes helped the virus avoid one of the mechanisms by which cells respond.” to kill the flu virus,” Calvignac-Spencer said. The evolution of the virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic has similarities to the current Covid-19 pandemic, such as consecutive outbreaks with many different strains, and the following outbreaks are more dangerous than the previous one. . Thanks to the advancement of science, today when understanding the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers can better understand the 1918 influenza pandemic: “The more we understand about the current pandemic, that The more we can understand the pandemic in the past, rather than vice versa,” Calvignac-Spencer emphasized. One significant advance is that researchers have been able to accurately sequence the viral genome in human tissue preserved in formalin for more than 100 years – something that has hitherto been thought to be very difficult. “Thanks to new techniques, the study ended up being much easier than we expected,” added Calvignac-Spencer, adding: “We can now sequence the viral genome from infected humans. buried in permafrost for up to 1,000 years, because the cold can help preserve DNA even longer.” The team of German scientists also wanted to sequence viral genomes that could have been stored in the bodies of ancient Egyptian mummies – the earliest mummies are about 5,000 years old.”The mummies were prepared to prevent biological processes, and that’s exactly what we want. So we will also embark on research to better understand other diseases of the past,” the German scientist said. about the group’s future plans.

WHO technical team leader on Covid-19 Maria Van Kerkhove. Photo: AFP According to the new announcement, WHO will use Greek letters to refer to variants that were first detected in countries such as the UK, South Africa and India. For example, the variant in the UK is called Alpha, in South Africa it is Beta, and in India it is Delta. The full list of names has been published on the WHO website. The Government of India earlier this month criticized the naming of variant B.1.617.2 – first detected in the country last October – as “Indian variant”, despite WHO never officially called it that. “No country should be discriminated against in detecting and reporting variants,” said WHO’s Covid-19 technical team leader Maria Van Kerkhove, “we don’t want to replace scientific names.” available, but only to assist in the transmission of certain information to the general public” If more than 24 variants are officially identified, meaning the system will run out of Greek letters, WHO will announce the new designation. Ms. Van Kerkhove on May 31 also called for close monitoring of variants and sharing of scientific data to help prevent the spread. Over the weekend, Vietnamese health officials warned of a new virus variant, which is believed to be a dangerous combination of two Alpha and Delta variants. While a scientific adviser to the British Government on May 31 said that the country is in the early stages of a third wave of Covid-19 infections, partly due to the Delta variant.

Pilot Wang Zunxi (a fairly well-known PLAAF officer) in an interview with China Central Television (CCTV 7) gave a very remarkable point of view. According to the veteran pilot, the multi-purpose fighter J-16 manufactured in Shenyang Aircraft Corporation and is being massively employed for PLAAF combat units of generation 4 ++. “J-16 fighter jets (including the J-16D electronic warfare version) have surpassed Russia’s Su-30 series heavy multi-role fighters in almost all tactical specifications. “. “The superiority shown in both avionics and electrodynamic properties, the radar reflection area reduction coefficient (RCS), the J-16 retains only the aerodynamic layout of the airframe”, pilot Vuong said clearly. Faced with the above situation, the Russian press stated that in order to seek export contracts or bring high morale and psychological state to the soldiers, the weapons manufacturers used very sophisticated promotional tools and are not always objective. Russian military experts rebuttal when emphasizing that the Chinese pilot is comparing the technical specifications of the electronic equipment on the Su-30MKK and Su-30MK2 fighters that are somewhat out of date. These fighters were supplied to the PLAAF 20 years ago, and they are actually significantly inferior to the J-16 when facing exercises (both for surface attack and long-range interception missions). ). The reason is that China’s Su-30 integrates the N001VE passive phase array radar (PESA), which ensures the realization of “truncated” synthetic aperture and “truncation” (SAR) mode with low resolution. , only allows the detection and classification of targets with large RCS parameters. In addition, the capacity and anti-interference ability of the N001VE radar is quite low, it can only catch the 1m2 RCS aerial target, 75 – 80 km away in case the enemy does not use electronic countermeasures. In fact, the J-16’s high energy and anti-interference active phase array (AESA) radar has a target capture range with 1 m2 RCS from 130 to 150 km, and high anti-interference ability, range is only slightly reduced in a highly noisy environment. This is due to the presence in the electronic architecture of the advanced AESA radar, which consists of more than 1,500 transceiver modules, each equipped with an individual arsenide / gallium nitride microwave transistor. Moreover, this type of radar is also capable of operating in synthetic aperture (SAR), reverse synthesized aperture (ISAR) and tracking ground targets moving in real time. Although the equipment for the J-16 is very advanced, the Russian side thinks that it is necessary to compare the J-16 with more modern modifications, for example the Su-30SM2 variant is about to enter service. Although the N035 Irbis radar that will equip the Su-30SM2 of the PESA class may be significantly inferior to the J-16’s AESA radar in terms of interference resistance, the capacity is higher (providing target acquisition range. with 1 m2 RCS at a distance of 250 – 270 km). With the N035 Irbis radar, the Su-30SM2 will have the ability to “foresee and shoot before” the J-16 in a direct confrontation situation, especially when Russia is still completing the long-range air-to-air missile “product. 180 ”. But it must be noted that the Su-30SM2 is still on paper, while the J-16 has been on duty for many years and there is no guarantee that the Russian fighter really possesses outstanding features. as they still publish.

The City People’s Committee assigned the Ho Chi Minh City Police to coordinate with relevant units to continue to maintain effective patrol and control, handle traffic safety violations associated with the task of preventing and combating Covid-19 epidemics. These units need to strictly handle behaviors that lead to accidents, traffic jams; have plans to effectively prevent, handle and suppress people who gather and race illegally. Ho Chi Minh City police will suppress and strictly punish illegal racers. Photo: MK The Department of Transport is responsible for coordinating with the Ho Chi Minh City Police to develop a reasonable transport plan, diversion and regulation of traffic during the holidays, resolutely suspending the operation of illegal bus stations, handling excess vehicles the person who regulates and publishes a hotline that accepts traffic related incidents. The City People’s Committee also assigned the Department of Information and Communication to coordinate with relevant departments and agencies to promote propaganda, dissemination of traffic, knowledge of epidemic prevention for people when participating in traffic. The Standing Committee of Traffic Safety of Ho Chi Minh City is the focal point to monitor and urge the units to perform the above tasks.

The world has been getting COVID-19 vaccination for several months. Besides the hope that the COVID-19 pandemic will soon be controlled, there is no small concern with the fact that a series of new virus variants have appeared and are still appearing. It can be said that the global market is in the race between the vaccine and the unknown virus variants. The COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson started being distributed in the US in early March amid dangerous spreading of the variants. Photo: GETTY IMAGES Many dangerous variations Virus strain means there is a mutation, changes in the genetic structure of the virus, causing the virus to change the way it works. In addition to the old virus strain, the world currently has many new variants such as B.1.1.7 (originated from England, has spread to more than 90 countries), B.1.351 from South Africa (has spread to more than 40 countries). , P1 and P2 from Brazil (has spread to 25 countries, some cases have been infected and recovered from being re-infected with variant P1), D614G from Europe, A.23.1 from Rwanda. In which the variant appeared from South Africa is said to be the most difficult to prevent and the most dangerous. Studies show that the vaccine strain B.1.351 of the vaccine from Pfizer / BioNTech and of AstraZeneca / Oxford is not as effective as the old vaccine. Clinical trials of vaccines by Johnson & Johnson and Novavax also showed that the ability to prevent this variant is not high. These variants – with a faster rate of spread, a higher risk of death, and an easier way to outdo existing vaccines – threaten efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet, the appearance of the variants also points to another concern: More dangerous variants will emerge in the future if the world fails to win the current race. The current pace of immunization globally is worryingly slow, especially in poor countries. It can be understood that even though rich countries vaccinate rapidly, new variants may emerge in poor countries that have not yet had adequate immunization coverage. Understanding these risks, vaccine developers are working hard to increase effectiveness in coping with variants. And the global health organizations are also making efforts to accelerate the speed of global distribution and vaccination. These are difficult times. This will be our toughest time to see which side wins. If we can hold on for another month or six, there’s a big difference. TS PETER HOTEZ , Rector of Baylor College of Tropical Medicine (USA) Vaccine firms’ efforts The Pfizer / BioNTech vaccines and Moderna’s vaccines (both doses) both use the mRNA molecule as the foundation. This molecule instructs the body to make a mutant protein found in the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which signals the immune system to fight off the mutant protein if encountered. The Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine (two doses) uses a reprogrammed version of another virus, adenovirus, that uses the DNA encoding the mutant protein of SARS-CoV-2. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine (single dose) also uses adenovirus. With these two vaccine platforms, once they want to redirect to deal with new variants, developers will need to modify their DNA or mRNA codes. Fortunately, this can be done simply and quickly, but the disadvantage is that it will require expensive changes to the vaccine production process and more time to produce and distribute. Hoping to avoid these shortcomings, Pfizer is now considering the possibility of adding a third dose to the current two-dose regimen to reinforce the effectiveness of preventing new variants. Talk to the radio NBC News At the end of February, Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla was confident that “the third dose will increase the antibody response 10 to 20 times”. Moderna is also working on the possibility of giving one-dose booster to the current two-dose regimen. In addition, at the end of February Moderna sent a version of the vaccine optimized to cope with the variant in South Africa to the US National Institutes of Health for further study. Meanwhile, Johnson & Johnson is confident its vaccine is resistant to many more variants because it is developed later than the above brands. Johnson & Johnson are also working on a two-dose vaccine (currently only available in one-dose version). Last week Pfizer announced that it would soon launch the trial of COVID-19, a positive news that gives further hope to quell the pandemic. Meanwhile according to the news agency Reuters Currently, many Asian countries are speeding up the distribution of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, after a period of concerns about the safety of the information that this vaccination causes thrombosis appeared in Europe. Earlier this week, many countries and territories in Asia activated vaccination. Some regional leaders are also vaccinated to reinforce confidence, including the Head of the Administration of Taiwan Institute – Mr. To Trinh Xuong, Prime Minister of Thailand Prayut Chan-o-cha. In Europe, after a short hiatus, many continental countries have also restored this vaccination. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson received the first dose last weekend and said “nothing strange”. The AstraZeneca vaccine is one of the few first available COVID-19 vaccines, available at a low cost and according to Reuters This vaccine will be at the heart of COVID-19 vaccination programs in most developing countries. The positive side of “vaccine diplomacy” Currently, the giants of vaccine COVID-19 (USA, China, India) are trying to expand distribution of vaccine globally. Compared to the US, the two countries India and China are more enthusiastic about implementing the campaign “vaccine diplomacy”. China has announced it will donate vaccines to 53 countries, and has already shipped millions of doses of its domestic vaccine to Asia, Africa and Latin America. When asked if the US could surpass China in “vaccine diplomacy” last week, the State Department spokesman did not respond. However, according to the news site The Hill The US is working with countries in the quartet group (India, Australia, Japan) to discuss providing vaccines to Asian countries to both stop the COVID-19 epidemic and as a counterbalance to China’s “vaccine diplomacy” campaign. National. Secretary of State Antony Blinken discussed this with three of their counterparts from February 18. During a meeting with G7 leaders last month, US President Joe Biden promised that the United States would donate 4 billion doses to the World Health Organization (WHO) Gavi vaccine alliance and possibly many more.