A scientist is pictured working at the Oxford Vaccine Group’s laboratory at Churchill Hospital in Oxford. Photo: Steve Parsons / AFP / Getty
Britain has entered into agreements with two more pharmaceutical companies to purchase millions of doses of its potential COVID-19 vaccines, as it seeks to secure hundreds of millions of vaccine doses from companies around the world.
The UK government has signed a deal with US-based Novavax (NVAX) to buy 60 million doses of its vaccine. Novavax said in a statement that the government had also agreed to work together on Phase 3 trials, or vaccine testing on large numbers of volunteers, in the UK from the third quarter of this year.
The government also has an agreement with US pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) for 30 million doses of its vaccine candidate, developed by its Janssen Pharmaceutica company, plus an agreement to buy 22 million more in the future.
The UK has been at an enormous retail price to secure coronavirus vaccines from companies with promising candidates. According to Reuters, it has made a total of agreements to buy a total of 362 million fax machines; the UK population is 66 million.
It agreed with Pfizer (PFE) and BioNtech (BNTX) to buy 30 million doses of its potential messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine, and to take 60 million doses of the Valneva of France, and 100 million doses of the AstraZeneca Oxford University vaccine in development.
BioNTech and Pfizer of Germany announced at the end of July that they had begun human trials of the vaccine on some 30,000 people.
There are currently more than 25 potential vaccine candidates in clinical trials around the world, according to the World Health Organization, with smaller biotech companies working with major drug makers to speed up and fund the processes.
Russia announced over the weekend that it has approved the ‘first’ world in the COVID-19 vaccine, but has drawn criticism from global health experts for not following strict test protocols.
