COVID Vaccine Bullets

•  The European Union is negotiating a 1.8 billion-dose order with Pfizer to be delivered in 2022 and 2023 (!!!) and will not renew contracts with AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson. The doses will be manufactured in the EU.
• For all that mRNA manufacturing has generally scaled well, we finally have a story of missed shipments from Moderna, who has announced they will cut vaccine deliveries to Canada and the UK due to manufacturing problems.

  While the company didn’t specify how many doses would be cut and where, Canada’s Procurement Minister Anita Anand said Friday that its shipments will contain 650,000 doses this month instead of the expected 1.2 million. 

  Moderna also warned up to 2 million of a planned 12.3 million shots scheduled for delivery in the second quarter would be delayed until the following quarter, according to a report from Reuters. However, a company spokesperson also told the news agency that its deliveries to the European Union and Switzerland remain on track.

• Pfizer's CEO now says there will likely be a need for COVID booster shots, possibly annually.
• CureVac plans on releasing trial data of its mRNA vaccine in the coming weeks.
• Moderna is putting its mRNA influenza and HIV vaccines into phase I trials this year.
  

  Current flu vaccines in the market have efficacy rates in the regoin [sic] of 40-60%: which Moderna believes its mRNA technology can improve on. It also says that its technology has several advantages over egg-based vaccine production: not only in terms of production advances but in accurately targetting vaccines against strains (egg-based production has the potential to cause unintended antigenic change to the vaccine virus).

  They also released phase I trial data for a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine, and a cytomegalovirus (CMV) vaccine.