US President Donald Trump’s administration has selected five companies, including Moderna Inc, AstraZeneca PLC and Pfizer Inc, as the most likely candidates to produce a COVID-19 vaccine, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing senior officials.
The other companies are Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and Merck & Co Inc, according to the paper.
The selected companies would have access to additional government funds, help in running clinical trials, and financial and logistical support, the New York Times reported.
There is no approved vaccine for COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
The report did not mention potential vaccines from French drugmaker Sanofi SA, Novavax Inc and Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc — among the more than 100 vaccines in development globally.
The announcement of the decision would be made at the White House in the next few weeks, the report said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We cannot comment on information that is market-moving,” a US Department of Health and Human Services official said.
The companies on the list are the farthest along in developing a vaccine and have significant manufacturing capacity.
The US is planning massive clinical trials involving 100,000 to 150,000 volunteers in total, with the goal of delivering an effective vaccine by the end of this year.
To make that deadline, the government aims to start mid-stage testing next month.
The first two vaccines to start mid-stage trials would likely be from Moderna and the AstraZeneca with Oxford University combination, US National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins said in an interview last month.
He said he expected vaccine candidates from J&J and Merck to eventually join the trial effort.
US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci on Tuesday said that he hoped to have “a couple hundred million doses” by the start of next year, CNN reported.
Separately, Germany and three other EU states are forging a new alliance aimed at securing access to coronavirus vaccines, once developed, and making sure they are distributed fairly around the world, business daily Handelsblatt reported.
Handelsblatt quoted German Minister of Health Jens Spahn and his colleagues from France, Italy and the Netherlands as writing in a letter to the EU Commission that it had seen access to vaccines as “one of the most urgent issues that the European Union has to address at present.”
Therefore, a core group of member states had joined up to “achieve the fastest and best possible outcome in negotiations with key players in the pharmaceutical industry.”
The four, acting on Berlin’s initiative, want to prevent the EU from losing out to the US and China in the race for a COVID-19 vaccine, the paper reported.
Efforts by Trump to gain first access to vaccine candidates in return for billions of US dollars invested in pharmaceutical companies are viewed with suspicion in Europe, Handelsblatt added.
The US has secured almost a third of the first 1 billion doses planned for AstraZeneca’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine by pledging up to US$1.2 billion, as world powers scramble for medicines to get their economies back to work.
Handelsblatt cited government sources as saying that Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands were talking to several pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca, about government research funds and purchase guarantees.
Europe must build up a “market power” in order to survive in the struggle for vaccines, Handelsblatt cited government sources in Berlin as saying.
The four were also talking to Britain, Norway, Singapore and Japan about possible cooperation.
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