AstraZeneca’s logo is reflected in a drop on a syringe needle in this illustration taken November 9, 2020.
DADO RUVIC/Reuters
British regulators have approved a vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca that scientists say will massively boost efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unlike the vaccines currently in use – made by BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna – the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine can be stored in regular refrigerators, and it has been priced far lower. Scientists say that will make it easier to distribute the vaccine to doctors’ offices, seniors’ homes and throughout developing countries. AstraZeneca said it will produce three billion doses on a not-for-profit basis throughout the pandemic. The company added on Wednesday that it could soon start producing two million doses a week.
The British government has bet heavily on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and ordered 100 million doses, enough to cover 50 million people since it requires two doses. The first batch is set to arrive in the country this week and inoculations will begin on Monday. Initial doses will be given to as many people as possible with the second dose coming up to 12 weeks later.
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The approval was “truly fantastic news – and a triumph for British science,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Twitter Wednesday. “We will now move to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible.”
The U.K. has already vaccinated around 800,000 people with the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine. But that vaccine must be stored at -70 C, while the Oxford-AstraZeneca drug can be kept in fridges at between 2 and 8 C. It also costs around $5 a dose, compared with $26 for the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine and $43 for Moderna’s.
The approval by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency was announced at a critical moment in the U.K. The country has been struggling with a rampant surge in COVID-19 infections, which scientists believe could be linked to a more contagious variant of the virus that has emerged in recent weeks. That variant has spread to dozens of countries, including Canada, despite bans on British travellers.
The number of daily cases in Britain hit a record high of more than 53,000 on Tuesday, and hospital admissions have reached levels not seen since the pandemic began last March. Much of the country has been put under near total lockdown, and on Wednesday, Health Secretary Matt Hancock is expected to announce further restrictions.
“The regulator’s assessment that this is a safe and effective vaccine is a landmark moment,” said Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group. “Though this is just the beginning, we will start to get ahead of the pandemic, protect health and economies when the vulnerable are vaccinated everywhere, as many as possible as soon as possible.”
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has been in development since last January. It uses a weakened version of a common cold virus that causes infections in chimpanzees but is harmless to humans. Once modified with the genetic sequencing of the spike protein found in COVID-19, the vaccine prompts the human immune system to react.
That’s different from the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which involve messenger RNA, or genetic coding, that instructs the vaccinated person’s cells to produce the viral protein, or antigen. That gives the immune system a preview of what the real virus will look like, without causing illness, so it can build defences.
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Approval of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has taken longer than the other two vaccines because of complications in the testing process.
Initially, the vaccine was supposed to be administered in two full doses, as with the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. However, a mistake in the early trials saw only half a dose administered at first, followed by a full second dose. That combination proved to be more effective, yielding 90-per-cent protection as opposed to 62 per cent for the two full doses. By contrast, the two other vaccines showed 95-per-cent efficacy during trials.
The MHRA has approved the two-full-dose regime of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and said that further data from the trials showed that it was 70-per-cent effective after the initial dose. It was 80-per-cent effective after the second dose, the agency added on Wednesday.
Prof. Sir Munir Pirmohamed, chair of the MHRA’s Commission on Human Medicine’s Expert Working Group, said that an analysis of data from the half-dose, full-dose combination found that the results had not been borne out.
June Raine, chief executive of the MHRA, said data showed that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was effective 21 days after the first dose. She added that initial doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech offered enough protection that the second doses could be administered up to three months later.
“The public and everyone who’s listening can be absolutely confident that the scientific rigour of our assessment has been as we would normally do it according to guidelines and standards,” Dr. Raine said. “These are difficult times for so many of us, but vaccines such as this one have the potential to save many lives and will see us come through.”
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Dr. Pirmohamed also said the MHRA was not recommending mixing the vaccines – for example giving an initial dose of one vaccine and a second dose of another – but that studies were under way to see whether that would be possible in future.
Public-health officials and scientists said approving the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was a critical moment in the pandemic. “At a time when we see the pandemic accelerating beyond our control, a rapid, efficient vaccination program with good population coverage is our only way out,” said Daniel Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London. “With two vaccines now in the rollout and very substantially more doses, it starts to look realistic that this could be achievable by the spring or early summer.”
How the Oxford-AstraZeneca drug works
16/16
14/14
11/11
The Oxford University and AstraZeneca Covid-19
vaccine can prevent up to 90 per cent of people
contracting coronavirus when it is administered as
a half dose followed by a full dose
at least one month apart
Spike
protein
Spike protein:
Gene is cut from
Sars-CoV-2 genome
Virus
genome
Gene: Inserted into DNA
of adenovirus which acts
as vector in vaccine
Adenovirus:
Unable to
cause disease
Vaccine: Induces spike
protein antigen – triggers
antibody immune response
Antibodies
Human immune
system: Produces
antibodies against
spike proteins
Vaccine: Can be
stored in refrigerator
at 2-8°C. Two doses
of vaccine are
required
graphic news, SOURCE: Reuters; Oxford
Vaccine Trial; University of Oxford
16/16
14/14
11/11
The Oxford University and AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine
can prevent up to 90 per cent of people contracting
coronavirus when it is administered as a half dose
The Oxford University and AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine can prevent
up to 90 per cent of people contracting coronavirus when it is administered
as a half dose followed by a full dose at least one month apart
Spike protein
Adenovirus:
Unable to
cause disease
Virus genome
Spike protein:
Gene is cut from
Sars-CoV-2 genome
Gene: Inserted into DNA
of adenovirus which acts
as vector in vaccine
Antibodies
Vaccine: Induces spike
protein antigen – triggers
antibody immune response
Human immune
system: Produces
antibodies against
spike proteins
Vaccine: Can be
stored in refrigerator
at 2-8°C. Two doses
of vaccine are required
graphic news, SOURCE: Reuters; Oxford Vaccine Trial; University of Oxford
The initial COVID-19 vaccinations in Canada and around the world raise questions about how people react to the shot, how pregnant women should approach it and how far away herd immunity may be. Globe health reporter Kelly Grant and science reporter Ivan Semeniuk discuss the answers.The Globe and Mail
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TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology group SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its Vision Fund investments.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. reported Tuesday a fiscal second quarter profit of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen loss in the year-earlier period.
Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).
SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications.
The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising share prices in some investment, such as U.S.-based e-commerce company Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.
SoftBank’s financial results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling investment portfolio that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence company Nvidia.
SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of Vision Funds.
The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology investment in Japan. SoftBank Group does not give earnings forecasts.
Shopify Inc. executives brushed off concerns that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will be a major detriment to many of the company’s merchants.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve heard from Trump, nor would there have been anything from (Democratic candidate) Kamala (Harris), which we think impacts the overall state of new business formation and entrepreneurship,” Shopify’s chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts on a call Tuesday.
“We still feel really good about all the merchants out there, all the entrepreneurs that want to start new businesses and that’s obviously not going to change with the administration.”
Hoffmeister’s comments come a week after Trump, a Republican businessman, trounced Harris in an election that will soon return him to the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, he threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and roughly 10 per cent to 20 per cent on goods from all other countries.
If the president-elect makes good on the promise, many worry the cost of operating will soar for companies, including customers of Shopify, which sells e-commerce software to small businesses but also brands as big as Kylie Cosmetics and Victoria’s Secret.
These merchants may feel they have no choice but to pass on the increases to customers, perhaps sparking more inflation.
If Trump’s tariffs do come to fruition, Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein pointed out China is “not a huge area” for Shopify.
However, “we can’t anticipate what every presidential administration is going to do,” he cautioned.
He likened the uncertainty facing the business community to the COVID-19 pandemic where Shopify had to help companies migrate online.
“Our job is no matter what comes the way of our merchants, we provide them with tools and service and support for them to navigate it really well,” he said.
Finkelstein was questioned about the forthcoming U.S. leadership change on a call meant to delve into Shopify’s latest earnings, which sent shares soaring 27 per cent to $158.63 shortly after Tuesday’s market open.
The Ottawa-based company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported US$828 million in net income for its third quarter, up from US$718 million in the same quarter last year, as its revenue rose 26 per cent.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 totalled US$2.16 billion, up from US$1.71 billion a year earlier.
Subscription solutions revenue reached US$610 million, up from US$486 million in the same quarter last year.
Merchant solutions revenue amounted to US$1.55 billion, up from US$1.23 billion.
Shopify’s net income excluding the impact of equity investments totalled US$344 million for the quarter, up from US$173 million in the same quarter last year.
Daniel Chan, a TD Cowen analyst, said the results show Shopify has a leadership position in the e-commerce world and “a continued ability to gain market share.”
In its outlook for its fourth quarter of 2024, the company said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.
“Q4 guidance suggests Shopify will finish the year strong, with better-than-expected revenue growth and operating margin,” Chan pointed out in a note to investors.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
TORONTO – RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust says it has cut almost 10 per cent of its staff as it deals with a slowdown in the condo market and overall pushes for greater efficiency.
The company says the cuts, which amount to around 60 employees based on its last annual filing, will mean about $9 million in restructuring charges and should translate to about $8 million in annualized cash savings.
The job cuts come as RioCan and others scale back condo development plans as the market softens, but chief executive Jonathan Gitlin says the reductions were from a companywide efficiency effort.
RioCan says it doesn’t plan to start any new construction of mixed-use properties this year and well into 2025 as it adjusts to the shifting market demand.
The company reported a net income of $96.9 million in the third quarter, up from a loss of $73.5 million last year, as it saw a $159 million boost from a favourable change in the fair value of investment properties.
RioCan reported what it says is a record-breaking 97.8 per cent occupancy rate in the quarter including retail committed occupancy of 98.6 per cent.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
