Pfizer, US Army nab a new approval for a decades-old vaccine

16 Aug 2021
endpts.com
VaccinemRNA
It won’t make Pfizer even a minuscule fraction of what its other new vaccines have and will earn, but the New York drugmaker has gotten yet another inoculation approved by the FDA. Pfizer announced Monday that US regulators have OK’d Ticovac, the company’s vaccine for tick-borne encephalitis, a virus that infects the brain and nervous system and can sometimes cause long-term cognitive, skeletal or muscular effects. If you’ve never heard of tick-borne encephalitis, that’s likely because it essentially does not exist in the United States. From 2000 to 2017, the CDC recorded eight cases in the US, all from travelers who had spent time in China or Europe, where Ticovac has been approved since the 1970s. (China has its own home-grown vaccine, called SenTaiBao, as does Russia). The US approval comes after a years-long collaboration between Pfizer, which picked up the shot when it bought out Baxter’s vaccine unit for $635 million in 2014, and the US Army. Military service members stationed abroad make up the vast majority of US residents who receive Ticovac, but doing so can be cumbersome: It requires three different shots and the military member often needs to obtain clearance to leave base and travel to a different country for each of them. The US approval will hopefully mean that military members can receive doses while still in the US. Unlike its Covid-19 shot or the recently approved Prevnar 20 shot, the TicoVac OK won’t mean much for Pfizer’s bottom line: Last year, the company collected just $27 million from TicoVac sales. But it will help provide strong protection against the tick-borne virus: Estimates of TicoVac’s efficacy vary but tend to hover between 96% and 99%, about the best researchers can hope for in a vaccine. In an era of mRNA, it’s a reminder of just how effective old-fashioned technology can be. TicoVac is made from an inactivated virus, the same platform Jonas Salk used for polio. The approval also comes as tick-borne encephalitis becomes a broader issue. The CDC estimates that the virus has expanded its range over the last three years, likely due to a complex combination of causes, including both changes in climate and changes in how researchers diagnose and conduct surveillance.
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