Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline reach multi-billion dollar deal with U.S. for coronavirus vaccine

This is the web version of The Capsule, a newsletter monitoring advances in health care and biopharma. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.

Happy Friday, readers. And on a housekeeping note, this will be the last daily missive of the Capsule for the foreseeable future. We’re going back to a weekly format next week and will be in your inboxes every Thursday afternoon. (Don’t worry, this was all planned. We’re not going anywhere.)

Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. effort to spur coronavirus vaccine candidates, added some new players to its roster on Friday. Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline, two European pharma giants with heavy footprints in the infectious diseases space, struck a deal worth up to $2.1 billion with the U.S. government that could provide 100 million doses and potentially up to 600 million of an experimental COVID vaccine (if it’s effective, that is).

This partnership, meant to spur manufacturing and development and secure supplies for Americans, is the largest of its kind under Operation Warp Speed.

That telegraphs an inevitable issue countries will have to face: Fighting over a limited supply of vaccine resources once one proves reliable.

Read on for the day’s news, have a wonderful weekend, and we’ll be in your inbox again on Thursday.

Sy Mukherjee
[email protected]
@the_sy_guy