The early-stage human trial data on the new vaccine, known as AZD1222, is expected to be published in the medical journal The Lancet on Monday, according to a Wednesday report from Reuters. The vaccine candidate is already in large-scale Phase III trials, meaning mass inoculations of thousands in multiple countries, although researchers have yet to disclose whether the Phase I trials demonstrated that it will be both safe and trigger an immune response. (Many coronavirus vaccine candidates use parallel processing, meaning multiple phases of trials happen simultaneously to speed research.) [...]
Recently, American news outlets have been fixated on the vaccine efforts of Moderna, a pharmaceutical company with a promising candidate. Yet as a for-profit company, much of the news around Moderna's vaccine is hard to separate from hype; the company's stock value shot up in May after it revealed promising early results from its vaccine candidate. And the Trump administration has a suspect connection to the company: Moncef Slaoui, President Trump's coronavirus "czar," held more than 150,000 stock options in Moderna before selling them off in May and was a former member of the company's board of directors. [...]
"Whether an innovation will be a success is uncertain, and it can take longer than traditional banks or venture capitalists are willing to wait," economist Mariana Mazzucato wrote in New Scientist in 2013. "In countries such as the US, China, Singapore and Denmark the state has provided the kind of patient and long-term finance new technologies need to get off the ground. Investments of this kind have often been driven by big missions, from putting a human on the moon, to solving climate change. This has required not only funding basic research – the typical 'public good' that most economists admit needs state help – but applied research and seed funding too."
No comments:
Post a Comment