With U.S.-China relations contentious, is China still a good place to do business in the biotech sphere? (BioSpace)
“The ChinaBio® State of Life Science China – 1H 2020 report points out that China is on the way to setting a new record for partnering deals. The $29 billion in deals the first half of the year is up 65% from the same period in 2019. ChinaBio predicts initial public offerings (IPOs) funds raised this year will total $11 billion, setting another record high. Clearly, investment capital is available…The pandemic has dampened interest in working with China only slightly.”
Thought bubble: if China is successful in finding domestic players who can be internationally competitive in this industry, it will likely be less inclined to partner with outside countries for vaccine development, as with COVID-19.
Meanwhile, 156 high-, low-, and middle-income countries - representing 64 percent of the global population - have joined a WHO initiative called Covax to develop and distribute 2 billion COVID-19 vaccines. (Vox)
Missing from the group: China and the United States.
Lawrence Gostin, a global health law professor at Georgetown, said “with major countries like the US and China sitting on the sidelines, Covax won’t have the financing and political muscle to assure global equity.”
Why wouldn’t either country join an initiative like this? Probably confidence in their own vaccines and an America-first/China-first approach to vaccine distribution. (FierceBiotech, Straits Times, NBC, The Guardian)
(The same probably goes for Russia as well, which was also absent from the list of 156.)
Parting shot: long read from Politico on how the virus could end.
“[Our future] rests on a series of known unknowns, things like how many people continue to wear masks and social distance and whether rapid Covid-19 tests become widely available and properly deployed. Much will depend on how effective the vaccines are, how many people refuse to get inoculated and how many people forget to get their second dose if the vaccine requires two (yes, that is a significant concern).
“Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, walked through the math: Roughly, “the formula would state that about two-thirds of the population would need to be vaccinated if [the vaccine] was 75 percent effective against shedding” (i.e., transmitting) the virus. If the vaccine is less effective than that, a greater percentage of the population needs to get vaccinated to close in on herd immunity. And vice versa.”
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