French Sanofi Will Make Pfizer’s Covid-19 Vaccine. Are More Manufacturing Partnerships Coming?

[Hamartia Antidote]

Sanofi Will Make Pfizer’s Covid-19 Vaccine. Are More Manufacturing Partnerships Coming?

Other big firms with no Covid-19 vaccine of their own may plan on helping manufacture competitors’ vaccines, analysts say.

www.barrons.com

The pharmaceutical firm Sanofi turned heads this past week with an agreement to help the German biotech BioNTech manufacture the Covid-19 vaccine it developed with Sanofi rival Pfizer.

It came in a week that the challenge posed by some of the new Covid-19 strains became clear, as data from vaccine trials by Novavax (ticker: NVAX) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) showed that they were less effective against the strain now prevalent in South Africa.

What comes next is a race against the virus, as vaccination efforts fight to keep up with a fast-changing virus.

The Sanofi (SNY) and BioNTech (BNTX) collaboration, which the company announced Wednesday, is unusual. But analysts speculated Friday that more manufacturing collaborations could be in the works, and that other big firms with no Covid-19 vaccine of their own may be planning on helping to manufacture competitors’ vaccines.

Sanofi is developing its own Covid-19 vaccine in partnership with another pharmaceutical firm, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). But the companies announced in early December that their vaccine would be delayed, following disappointing results in older adults in early trials. The companies plan to begin a new trial of the vaccine in February, and Sanofi will start a separate trial of a messenger RNA vaccine developed in collaboration with Translate Bio (TBIO) sometime this quarter.

But with no vaccine of its own ready to go, Sanofi decided to dedicate its manufacturing capacity to help BioNTech and Pfizer. “We asked ourselves how we could make ourselves useful in the present, to participate to the collective effort to end this crisis as soon as possible,” Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson told the French newspaper Le Figaro, according to a translation by Politico.

Sanofi isn’t the only pharmaceutical firm with no effective vaccine of its own. There is Sanofi’s partner GlaxoSmithKline, and there’s also Merck (MRK), which announced Monday that it was giving up on the two experimental vaccines it was developing. All three are among the largest vaccine makers in the world.

The most obvious potential recipient of their help is Novavax, which saw its share price climb 64.9% on Friday after its vaccine appeared more effective than Johnson & Johnson’s.

Novavax said that it aims to produce 2 billion doses of its vaccine per year, at a rate of 150 million per month.

On an investor call on Thursday, SVB Leerink analyst Dr. Geoffrey Porges asked Novavax’s CEO, Stanley Erck, whether the company was collaborating with any manufacturers aside from the Serum Institute of India, the large Indian vaccine maker with which Novavax announced a deal in the fall.

The hard part right now is coordinating on a global scale all the supplies that go into production, Erck said You’ve got bags, you’ve got filters, you’ve got media ...We’ve identified a couple of different raw material components that are in short supply globally, and we’re trying to get people to increase capacity as quickly as possible.
In a note Friday, Porges said that Erck had not answered the question directly, and said that could indicate that a manufacturing partnership was being negotiated.

Given the circumstances, we believe it is likely that other vaccine manufacturers such as Sanofi or GSK contribute either bulk manufacturing or fill and finish capability to accelerate NVAX’s scale-up, Porges wrote.

Evercore ISI analyst Josh Schimmer had another theory: Given scarce global manufacturing capacity for vaccines—I suspect MRK may step up as NVAX’s partner after abandoning its COVID vaccine efforts, he wrote. He said that could help Novavax manufacture the booster doses the company has said it will make to protect against the South African variant.

 

[waz]

Yep the French failed by themselves to produce something, so here they are making the US vaccine. Louis Pasteur will be spinning in his grave.
Macron and the French establishment did say they will show the British a thing or two (after the EU exist) , they certainly did. We never laughed so hard at them.
Meanwhile our vaccine is saving the world.

 

[gangsta_rap]

how come its only the UK essentially the generated a research based vaccine in the west? you would think the french and germans would have something alike in the works.

I don't like how the big pharma hats (especially white american big pharma) is influencing which vaccine leads which doesnt. very distressing