Malaysian researchers found that treatment with the anti-parasite drug ivermectin did not prevent patients with COVID-19 from becoming severely ill in a randomized clinical trial published in the JAMA Internal Medicine journal on February 18.

Novavax

Novavax Inc. delivered just a small fraction of the 2 billion COVID-19 shots the company plans to send around the world in 2022 and has delayed first-quarter shipments in Europe and lower income countries such as the Philippines, public officials involved in their government’s vaccine rollouts told Reuters.

Novavax Inc. filed for emergency use authorization of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine for U.S. adults, a long-awaited step following months of struggles with development and manufacturing problems.

Omicron

The BA.2 subvariant of the Omicron coronavirus variant, which has quickly taken over in Denmark, is more transmissible than the more common BA.1 and more able to infect vaccinated people, a Danish study found.

The BA.2 subtype of the Omicron coronavirus variant appears to have a substantial growth advantage over the currently predominant BA.1 type, Britain’s UK Health Security Agency said on Jan. 28.

The Omicron variant appears to result in less severe COVID-19 than seen during previous periods of high coronavirus transmission including the Delta wave, with shorter hospital stays, less need for intensive care and fewer deaths, according to a new U.S. study.

The risk of hospitalization with the Omicron variant of coronavirus is about one-third that of the Delta variant, according to British analysis of more than a million cases of both types in recent weeks.

According to data from real-world studies from Scotland and England, the Omicron variant does not lead to as much hospitalization as Delta.

Fingerpaint, biopharma’s global commercialization partner for analytics-enabled integrated solutions, announced it acquired Engage, a London-based, award-winning, data and analytics–enabled healthcare marketing firm. 

A major British study into mixing Covid-19 vaccines found that people had a better immune response when they received a first dose of AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech shots followed by Moderna nine weeks later, according to the results on December 6.