Keep reading for a few articles and a podcast that go deeper on the Biotech and China related topics discussed in this week’s episode of Telltales. If you have yet to listen, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and SoundCloud, or you can listen to it right here…
Until next week, stay healthy and stay informed!
Biotech
Moderna Recommends Covid-19 Vaccine Booster to Protect Against New Variants. Company said vaccine sales rose above $4 billion in the latest quarter and that it signed $20 billion worth of advanced purchase agreements for 2021…
The company said its vaccine remains 90% effective against preventing Covid-19 disease for at least six months, but said it sees a decline in antibody levels after six months, especially against newer strains of the coronavirus including the Delta variant. In a Phase 2 study, a third shot of the original formulation showed robust antibody responses against Covid-19 variants of concern, Moderna said.
mRNA for Flu Vaccine? AI Protein-Folding Goes Open Source. This is a brief, 2 part podcast covering both mRNA vaccines and a recent development in Google’s DeepMind AlphaFold project…
Moderna has started clinical trials for a flu vaccine, called mRNA-1010, that is based on the same mRNA technology that Moderna and Pfizer used for their COVID vaccines, and that several other companies including Sanofi and Glaxo all are actively working on for the influenza use case.
Google’s DeepMind AlphaFold, in partnership with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, is publicly sharing its entire protein structure database -- with predicted protein structure models for ~20,000 proteins expressed by the human genome -- meaning that all its data will be freely and openly available to the scientific community.
FDA Weighs Faster Timeline for Approving Pfizer Vaccine. Some officials hope the agency can grant full approval to vaccine this month, while others think September is a more realistic target…
Pfizer-BioNTech is the only vaccine maker to submit all necessary paperwork to get full, nonemergency use approval against Covid-19.
China
China flexes nuclear muscle to burnish its big power credentials…
“For a very, very long time, we talked about China as a future problem. Now, China is clearly a nuclear problem,” said David Santoro, president of Hawaii-based think-tank Pacific Forum and a co-organiser of semi-official US-China nuclear dialogue for 15 years until 2019.
China’s Corporate Crackdown Is Just Getting Started. Signs Point to More Tumult Ahead. Regulators are pushing companies to do more to serve the Communist Party’s goals, rattling market...
Biden offers Hong Kongers in US temporary ‘safe haven’. Washington cites Beijing’s ‘repression’ as it defers removals of territory’s residents by 18 months…
read more @ FT…China Wants Manufacturing—Not the Internet—to Lead the Economy. Even as Beijing unleashes a regulatory assault against tech companies, it continues to shower subsidies and protection on manufacturers…
President Xi Jinping would beg to differ. In his estimation, technol-ogy comes in two varieties: nice to have, and need to have. Social media, e-commerce and other consumer internet companies are nice to have, but in his view na-tional greatness doesn’t depend on having the world’s finest group chats or ride-sharing
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