Author: Biotech Express

Printed in January 2021 Issue India’s regulatory authority for medical products, the Central Drug Standards Control Organization (CDSCO), gave “restricted emergency approval” on 2nd January 2020 for two Covid-19 Vaccines, namely Serum Institute of India (SII)’s “Covishield” being manufactured in India under technology transfer from Oxford University-Astra Zeneca, and the indigenous “Covaxin” developed by Bharat Biotech in collaboration with ICMR/National Institute of Virology. AIPSN salutes the efforts of Indian scientists, research institutions and vaccine manufacturers in bringing to the forefront indigenous vaccines like Covaxin in less than a year, with some other candidates just a few months behind. As and…

Printed in January 2021 Issue The U.S. United States Department of Defense (DOD) awarded Moderna a contract worth $1,966,598,000 for an additional 100 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine. The manufacturing will be handled in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is expected to be fulfilled by June 30, 2021. Moderna’s vaccine has been granted emergency use authorization (EUA) in the U.S. and in Canada. The EUA was granted by the FDA on December 18 for individuals 18 years of age and older. Health Canada granted authorization on December 23. The Canadian authorization came under Health Canada’s Interim Order Respecting the Importation, Sale…

Printed in January 2021 Issue Bharat Biotech International Limited in a statement issued on January 9 said the probable cause of death of a volunteer during the Phase-III trials of its COVID-19 vaccine in Madhya Pradesh was cardio-respiratory failure as a result of suspected poisoning. The company added that the case is under police investigation and the death is not related to the vaccine trial. A volunteer named Deepak Maravi received the trial vaccine at Bhopal’s People’s Medical College on December 12, 2020. He was found dead nine days later at his home. The investigation into the cause of death…

After passing by many hurdles finally Serum Institute of India’s Covishield and Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin have received DCGI’s  approval for emergency use against coronavirus. The approvals were given but faced questions after taking the step without publishing efficacy data for the homegrown coronavirus vaccine.The vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India is a Recombinant Chimpanzee Adenovirus vector vaccine (Covishield) encoding the SARS-CoV-2 Spike (S) glycoprotein with technology transfer from AstraZeneca/Oxford University. Bharat Biotech has developed a Whole Virion Inactivated Corona Virus Vaccine (Covaxin) in collaboration with ICMR and NIV (Pune), from where they received the virus seed strains. This…

Printed in January 2021 Issue PLOS ONE has retracted a paper on pneumonia in people with Covid-19 after the authors could not allay concerns about the integrity of their data. The article, “Lung ultrasound score in establishing the timing of intubation in COVID-19 interstitial pneumonia: A preliminary retrospective observational study,” appeared in September and was written by a group from Zhejiang University School of Medicine, in Hangzhou, China. About three months after publication, PLOS ONE issued an expression of concern about the article, citing suspicious overlap with a 2018 paper in a different journal. It concluded: The corresponding author [Xiao…

Printed in January 2021 Issue As Retraction Watch readers may know, as part of keeping our database of retractions up to date, we’ve been publishing a running list of COVID-19 papers that have been retracted. That list has been steadily growing since the end of April, but yesterday the number jumped from 45 to 72, so we thought we’d walk through where the additional retractions came from. Ten of the new retractions are from one publisher — Elsevier — and for one reason: Elsevier screwed up. How? Well, they published these ten papers twice. The error has nothing at all…

Recently UK has announced that it has got second mutated strain of COVID-19 The United Kingdom is also the first country to begin COVID inoculation using a vaccine. The World Health Organization which has criticized several times before in pandemic has said it found a “substantial increase in transmission of the virus but no evidence yet of increased severity” however it has not shown except on twitter that how they conclude this and what they have studied so far. The news are all over but there is no genetic or proteomics study to show the claims. We have searched internet…

In the early days of the pandemic, the IHME projected a far less severe outbreak than other models, which drew the attention of Donald Trump, who was eager to downplay the danger. At a March 31 press briefing, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, Debbie Birx, with the president at her side, used IHME charts to show that the pandemic was rapidly winding down. ““Throughout April, millions of Americans were falsely led to believe that the epidemic would be over by June because of IHME’s projections,” the data scientist Youyang Gu noted in his review of the institute’s work. “I think…

The Union health ministry has said in response to an RTI application that it does not know where records related to agenda circulated in meetings of the National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for COVID-19 (NEGVAC) are held. Venkatesh Nayak of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative had approached the ministry seeking details of the constitution and working of the expert group such as dates of meetings, a copy of the detailed agenda circulated in relation to every meeting, presentations made before its members, and material it had shared with the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). Nayak had also sought to know…

Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford released positive results about their covid-19 vaccine being the frontrunner, claiming that it was on average 70 per cent effective, and could reach 90 per cent efficacy depending on dosing. But Researchers have raised several questions over the findings. During the AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford’s clinical trials, some participants were mistakenly given half a dose rather than a full dose in their first round of shots, according to BBC News. Still, the trial continued and the researchers discovered those given the weaker dosage produced a better immune response. The results…