The advisory committee of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will convene a meeting on 2 November to hold talks on the usage of Covid-19 vaccines in children aged five to 11 years, Reuters reported. Advisors to the US Food and Drug Administration have already recommended granting authorisation for Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid-19 shot for children of this age group. The vaccine is currently is cleared for use in individuals aged 16 and above and is also authorised for use in children aged 12 to 15 years.
Merck and the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) have entered a voluntary licencing deal to offer affordable international access to the former’s oral Covid-19 drug, molnupiravir. The experimental antiviral drug is intended to treat mild to moderate Covid-19 in adult patients at risk for disease progression and/or hospitalisation. The deal will permit more companies selected by MPP to produce generic versions of molnupiravir. The royalty-free licence is applicable to 105 low- and middle-income nations.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Novavax has finished its rolling regulatory filing to the UK Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA) seeking Conditional Marketing Authorization (CMA) for its Covid-19 vaccine candidate, NVX-CoV2373. The company said it has included preclinical, clinical and chemistry, manufacturing and controls data in the submission. The vaccine demonstrated efficacy of 96.4% against the original SARS-CoV-2 strain in a Phase III trial of 15,000 subjects in the country. The filing also comprises findings from the PREVENT-19 trial, which enrolled nearly 30,000 subjects in the US and Mexico.
