Coronavirus - COVID-19 Vaccine Updates

Coronavirus diseases had already infected millions of people around the world according to the present data, as of this writing it had reached out to more than 4.6 million cases worldwide.

Deaths has been alarming as the United States of America recently reported to have a death of 5,000 people within 24 hours and is now totaled to more than 90,000 cases. According to statistics expert, America will breach 100,000 mark in no time.

Considering the asymptomatic factor of this disease, the world leaders' have raised their guard shutting down their borders to prevent the spread of the pandemic.

With this, international pharmaceutical companies have been working in a neck breaking pace in addressing this new virus that has been crippling the entire humanity.

Below are some of the notable pharmaceutical companies that has been racing to produce a drug and vaccine to battle this disease.

The Swiss pharma giant Roche with their researchers and scientists announced that they have developed a game changer against the coronavirus after their data shows of a 100 percent accurate antibody trials.

"it is a highly specific assay with specificity of 100 percent" the national coordinator of the UK Coronavirus Testing Programme, Professor John Newton said on an interview.

The Massachusetts biotechnology company, Moderna, had announced a promising early results for their human test for the vaccine. Though the data has not yet published in a scientific journal, but early data shows that the result for human responses show that the vaccine is safe and most especially - effective.

Sinovac Biotech is a privately held Beijing-based company that had also joined the raise in developing a vaccine against the virus that first occured on their country. The researchers from the Sinovac Biotech has been testing animals, specifically rhesus macaques - an species of monkeys, and told to a report that their vaccine was able to protect the healty animals when exposed to the coronavirus.

The pharmaceutical company stated that the vaccine consist of chemically inactivated version of the virus was injected to the monkeys. The ginea pigs where then observed within seven days and the researchers said that they could not detect the coronavirus in the pharynx or lungs of any of the subjects.

Due to the promising results, Chinese President Xi Jinping had announced on Monday, May 18, 2020, during the 73rd session of the World Health Assembly that they will make the vaccine available globally for the public good as soon at it became available. The president previously reported that China will provide $2 billion for COVID-19 assistance with economic and social development in affected countries, most especially developing one.

Pfizer, the US-based drugmaker had joined the race in hunt to develop a vaccine to beat the coronavirus.

The American multinational pharmaceutical corporation which has a base in New York City had already have their first stage of testing involving 200 volunteers on the age of 18-55. 

The vaccine trials are currently going on in USA. The effort of the American pharmaceutical was made in collaboration with BNTECH, a german company, that is why human trials were also made in parts of Germany.

Pfizer researchers said that the next phase will invlove 160 new candidates from a higher risk categories which will be then tested and evaluated.

Pfizer uses mRNA vaccines which was also the same strategy used by another pharma giant, Moderna.

Sanofi S.A., the French multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in Paris, France had just announced that the candidate vaccine is expected to enter clinical trials in the second half of 2020 and to be available by the second half of 2021.

On the side news, Sanofi drew criticism among world leaders after they announced to the public that they will prioritize US before the rest of the world on the vaccine once it got fully developped. This is due to the money the US government invested to manufacture the potential vaccine.

Being a French company, the French government had made pressure to Pfizer over the scandalous prioritization remark.

Sanofi on the other hand retracted their previous statement after their CEO Paul Hudson made an interview with the international daily newspaper, Financial Times.

"The vaccine against COVID-19 should be a global public good and its access need to be equitable and universal," - the France official said.

Altimmune, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company based in Gaithersburg, Maryland, United States announced that they have commenced testing on COVID-19 vaccine candidates on their laboratory.

"In collaboration with the University of Alabama at Birmingham, we have commenced preclinical testing of candidates for our Covid-19 vaccine, AdCovid," - the company said.

Altimmune named their candidate vaccine as AdCovid and will be administered intranasally.

"AdCovid is being developed as a single dose, intranasal vaccine that is designed to activate multiple arms of the immune system including humoral (antibodies), cellular (T-cell) and mucosal immunity," - Altimmune said.