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Merck Vaccine Sales Drop as US Declines Strike Another Pharma
While the company’s sales outlook was otherwise rosy, Merck took sales hits on Gardisil, Proquad, Varivax and Vaxneuvance. The woes for Merck’s HPV vaccine Gardasil continued as sales dropped 25% worldwide in the third quarter, driven by continued low demand in China and declines in uptake in the U.S.
Merck executives, speaking during a third quarter earnings call on Thursday, also noted the expiration of a “catch-up” reimbursement program in Japan and potential challenges ahead from U.S. vaccine recommendations.
“There are some macro factors there,” Caroline Litchfield, Merck’s CFO, said of the U.S. market on the call. She cited recommendations that the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) could make down the line potentially affecting future sales. ACIP had scheduled a vote on changing HPV vaccine guidelines this summer but ultimately delayed that vote.
The Trump Administration Move to Study Aluminum in Vaccines Worries Scientists
The Trump administration is studying the safety of an ingredient commonly used in vaccines, an additive that contains aluminum. Coming after other recent changes to vaccine policy, many public health experts worry that the administration may now try to remove the ingredient. “We want no aluminum in the vaccine,” President Trump said recently at a White House briefing.
For almost a century, some important vaccines, including shots that protect against diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis and the flu, have included aluminum salts, compounds that contain small amounts of aluminum. They are used as adjuvants to give the immune system an extra kick necessary to make the shots protective.
“Aluminum is added to some vaccines because it’s a very safe, but also effective, stimulant of the immune system,” says Dr. Jesse Goodman, a vaccine expert at Georgetown University who used to regulate vaccines at the Food and Drug Administration. “It basically stimulates your cells to make more antibodies and a stronger immune response overall.”
Harvard HIV Scientist Xie Zhenfei Joins China’s National Virus Lab in Wuhan
The South China Morning Post reported:
Award-winning Xie Zhenfei, a Harvard University rising star in cutting-edge research aimed at an HIV vaccine, has left the U.S. and joined China’s leading biosafety laboratory in Wuhan. Xie made headlines in May last year as first author of a landmark paper published by the journal Science that showed a way to use mRNA technology — used to develop vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic — to develop an effective vaccine against HIV/Aids.
The method addresses the main challenge to a vaccine — the very fast mutation of HIV that quickly leads to an infected person battling a swarm of viral strains — by effectively training the immune system along multiple routes, not just one.
Xie and his fellow researchers from the Ragon Institute — a collaboration between Harvard, affiliated teaching hospital Mass General Brigham and MIT — used modified mice to produce numerous human-origin B cells that could identify the virus swarm.
FDA Recalls Blood Pressure Medicine Over Cancerous Chemical
More than half a million bottles of blood pressure medication are being recalled over a cancer-causing chemical connected to the prescription drug, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, based in Parsippany, New Jersey, issued a voluntary recall on Oct. 7 for some of the prazosin hydrochloride capsules it distributed, and the FDA classified it as a Class II risk level on Oct. 24.
The drug was approved by the FDA to treat high blood pressure, but sometimes prescribed off-label to help manage symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, particularly nightmares and sleep problems. The medication works by relaxing blood vessels, improving blood flow and reducing blood pressure.
Kenvue Hires P&G Executive to Help Overcome Tylenol Fallout
Kenvue Inc. hired an executive from Procter & Gamble Co. to help the company get back on track after its biggest product, Tylenol, has come under scrutiny from the Trump administration.
Carlos De Jesus will become Kenvue’s next group president of North America effective Nov. 3, according to an internal memo viewed by Bloomberg News.
How Moderna, the Company That Helped Save the World, Unraveled
When Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel addressed the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January 2021 — virtually, along with the rest of the participants who tuned in at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — he was armed with two things he’d lacked the year before: a vaccine that was 95% effective against a virus that had shut down the world, and a slogan. “This,” he declared, “is just the beginning.”
The phrase, repeated and reprinted dozens of times thereafter, tidily summed up the company’s monumental ambitions: to plow the profits and know-how from its Covid coup into a new crop of mRNA vaccines and therapies that would change medicine and turn Moderna into one of the largest drugmakers on the planet.
It has not worked out that way.
Today Moderna faces a crisis unlike any other in its 15-year-history. Wall Street has pushed executives to slash spending, as Covid vaccine sales have slumped and no new blockbusters have emerged. The federal government, which had all but midwifed the company, has turned on it. In May, the Health and Human Services Department — led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has touted falsehoods about mRNA vaccines — canceled $766 million in contracts to prepare shots for a potential bird flu pandemic.
Government Shutdown Slows Flu Shot Delivery for South Dakota Prison Inmates
South Dakota Searchlight reported:
Flu shots aren’t hard to come by in South Dakota in 2025. Unless you’re in prison.
The South Dakota Department of Corrections has been rationing its supply of flu vaccines this month in response to a federal government shutdown-related shortage.
The department offers the vaccines at no cost to the 3,800 inmates scattered across the state’s six prison campuses. Last year, spokesman Michael Winder told South Dakota Searchlight, the department administered 1,225 flu shots.
At this point, he wrote in an email the department is “prioritizing high-risk offenders to receive the vaccines.” Flu shots are not in short supply for the general public, according to spokespersons for Avera and Sanford Health, South Dakota’s two largest health care providers. But the department doesn’t get its shots through them.
Instead, its supplies come from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The shots first come to the state Department of Health, which then distributes them to the Department of Corrections. As of Monday, Health Department spokeswoman Tia Kafka said, the state hadn’t received its entire correctional supply.
