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Originally Posted by red-beard
Yep. But to get people, they will pay them...and some people need the money.
I think the Moderna will get approved first, but as you said, they don't have the capacity. Most people will probably end up with the J&J vaccine.
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I think MRNA and BNTX/PFE will be neck and neck for first US approval, then the -80F cold chain required for PFE limits it while MRNA’s capacity limits it. Not sure who’s next, JNJ trial just got “paused”, AZN trial still halted (in US), others haven’t really got going yet. For US alone, MRNA and PFE can probably supply the domestic market by 2Q 2021, especially considering the % of vaccine refusers. But for the world, or at least the part of the world that the US trades with, to get vaccinated the other companies need to get approved. AZN probably will, in Europe, potentially even before MRNA/BNTX get EUA in US. They’ve already started the rolling approval process with the European Medicines Agency.
Interesting that LLY’s antibody trial of LLY-CoV555 got paused too. This was their trial in hospitalized Covid pts with more severe disease, and they are using a huge dose. The limited info released suggests it wasn’t a individual pt, but that the trial overall hit a safety boundary. Meaning the drug arm as a whole may be showing worse safety trends than the placebo arm. My speculation is that if you take a hospitalized patient with more severe disease, he’s potentially at the point where the immune overreaction is the biggest threat, and administering a big dose of antibodies might turn out to be not helpful but harmful. And maybe doing that on top of remedsivir is also not a good idea. Pure speculation.
REGN has not had their hospitalization trial paused, but it’s a risk. REGN does seem to maybe have been cleverer than LLY. In their trial of REGN-COV2 in outpatients, they tested natural antibody levels before dosing, so they got detailed data on exactly who the drug helped and figured out that it helped those pts who hadn’t developed their own antibody response. If they did this in the hosp pt trial, then if they run into a safety issue like LLY may have, they might be able to adjust and keep going.
Fingers x’d.