Vaccines
Oh, ouch! CureVac has really crappy preliminary Phase 3 results: 49%. CureVac is an mRNA vax, and they had made all kinds of partnerships with really big pharma companies to manufacture it. They were supposed to deliver 300M this year and 1B next year. That hurts.
Treatments
The RECOVERY testing platform in the UK has looked at Regeneron’s monoclonol antibodies. Verdict: it can help some with people who have not mounted a immune response, but might be harmful to those who have.
Problem #1 is that it’s expensive; problem #2 is that monoclonal antibody production uses a lot of the same equipment and materials that vaccine production uses.
Recommended Reading
WOW. This article talks about making artificial antibody-like things, designing little proteins to stick to the spike like Velcro. It’s in trials, and extremely effective, and in trials as GBP510. (This article is in Recommended Reading and not under Vaccines because I couldn’t figure out how to summarize it.)
This article looks at how cross-institution collaboration has changed during the pandemic. This companion article is similar, but more prescriptive.