Among the 100 or so global players now working on experimental Covid-19 vaccines, most of the entities touted as
frontrunners are obscure biotechnology and nanotechnology firms. Despite their focus on razzle-dazzle "next-generation" technologies that
private foundations, the
U.S. government and the
military apparently find alluring, few of these companies have any prior experience successfully bringing vaccines to market.
In contrast, some of the biggest and most experienced vaccine manufacturers in the U.S. and
globally, including Merck, Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), seemed, until recently, to be
missing in action — "
conspicuously absent" from the frontrunner lists. In May, a Merck executive explained the relative silence this way: "It's not that the company wasn't working on the problem, . . . but that it simply wasn't
ready to speak." Meanwhile, GSK — which leads the world in
global vaccine revenues — has been casting itself as the wise old granddaddy in a sea of impetuous upstarts, modestly stating its preference for "the
slow and steady approach of focusing on an established technology that has the best chance of reaching the widest possible demographic."
In late spring, GSK apparently decided to reverse its tortoise-like approach and stepped boldly out of the shadows. After having already made its "established technology" — that is, GSK's "pandemic vaccine adjuvant system" — available to several regional players
earlier in the year, a splashy mid-April
announcement reported that GSK would override its ordinarily fierce competition with Sanofi to embark on a Covid-19 vaccine joint effort, pooling both know-how and manufacturing capacity with the French pharma giant. Under this "unprecedented" arrangement, Sanofi will provide the coronavirus antigen while GSK ponies up its trademark AS03 adjuvant system.
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