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Florent Beuyet's avatar

The detail that should alarm pharmacists most here isn't the headline efficacy debate — it's the manufacturing switch. Process 1 (PCR-amplified DNA template) is what the pivotal trial ran on; Process 2 (linearized plasmid DNA in E. coli) is what the public actually received, after being tested in just 252 people, with the planned comparability study simply never run. For any biologic, a process change at commercial scale normally triggers a rigorous comparability exercise — batch-to-batch consistency is the entire basis for assuming the trial data apply to what's in the vial. Skip that step and the 95% figure describes, strictly speaking, a different product than the one dispensed. Layer on the ANMAT finding — 52 participants at the largest site receiving roughly 58 mcg instead of 30 from a dilution error — and you get a CMC problem stacked on a GCP problem. Whatever one's stance on the mRNA platform, those two layers deserve to be separated from the politics.

Mrs. Ashe's avatar

Liars, cheats and thieves

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