CVS Health : Vaccine Panel Transcript ()

COVID-19 Vaccines: From the Lab to Your Arm

J.P. Morgan presentation delivered at the 39th Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference on

Wednesday, January 13, 2021 at 12:45 PM

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Cory Kasimov: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to J.P. Morgan's 39th Annual Healthcare Conference. Sorry for the short delay getting started.

My name is Cory Kasimov. I'm a senior biotech analyst here. I'm joined by my colleagues Lisa Gill, our healthcare technology and distribution analyst, and Chris Schott, our US pharmaceuticals analyst. It's our pleasure to host this keynote on all things related to COVID-19 vaccines.

We're very excited to have a really distinguished group of panelists today, including Dr. Moncef Slaoui, the chief advisor of Operation Warp Speed, Angela Hwang, group president of Pfizer Biopharmaceuticals, Stéphane Bancel, the CEO of Moderna, Karen Lynch, the current president of Aetna and incoming CEO of CVS Health, and Brian Tyler, the CEO of McKesson.

Thanks to you all for taking the time to join us today. Even more so, I think I speak for everyone when I say up front, thank you for all your efforts in fighting this pandemic.

Our hope with this keynote is to cover all aspects of COVID-19 vaccines, from development and production, to distribution logistics, and to longer-term outlook for the pandemic.

With that, Dr. Slaoui, perhaps you can take a couple minutes to set the stage for our discussion by providing some overarching perspective on where we are in addressing the pandemic and how you're thinking about some priorities at this point in time.

Dr. Moncef Slaoui: Thank you, Cory. Thanks for putting together this panel. I look forward to a good conversation.

In a few minutes I'll say, to an extraordinary pandemic that hit us, starting, say, in January of 2020, there has been an extraordinary response from the healthcare ecosystem, or from the biotech pharmaceutical ecosystem more specifically.

In that period of, no more than 11 months elapsed between identifying the sequence of the virus and having two vaccines approved and in use in the US population. It's truly an exceptional achievement.

Thanks to great efforts in the companies where there are large biotechs or large pharma, great efforts thanks to various US governmental entities within the Human Health Services or the Department of Defense, and also thanks to a very aggressive strategy put forward to incentivize and support -- financially, but also operationally -- the discovery, the development, the manufacturing, and now the distribution of the vaccines.

In May of 2020, there were, if my memory doesn't fail me, more than 120 different vaccine programs described in the world. There may still be close to a hundred of them at different levels of activity. Within the US, Operation Warp Speed was set up to try and accelerate development of a number of vaccines. Without getting into the details, six vaccines were selected.

Fast-forward to today. Five of these vaccines are in phase III trials or have completed the phase

1. trials. Two are approved [indecipherable] messenger RNA, and we have representatives from Pfizer and Moderna. I think that both spearheaded these programs to allow us to have the vaccines approved and in use.

Two more have completed the recruitment in their phase III and are accruing cases -- one by Johnson & Johnson and should be coming to fruition very shortly by the end of this month or early next month, and one by AstraZeneca already approved elsewhere and completing phase III trial here in the US and potentially getting an emergency use authorization in March.

Then, still a protein vaccine by Novavax. It's in phase III trials. More than 8,000 subjects recruited, and a Sanofi collaboration with GSK with a vaccine that's in phase IIb trials. Great progress in terms of developing the vaccine clinically.

Also, great progress in terms of manufacturing the vaccines in parallel and at high risk, either within the companies as has been the case for Moderna and Pfizer, or in manufacturing capabilities facilities of having accessed as part of US government contracting with contract manufacturers, either for production of the vaccine [inaudible] or also, critically, for the pre-finish activities are major bottlenecks.

It's the same activities used for all the vaccines. To date, as I said, two vaccines are approved. 40

million doses have been distributed already. Only nine million people have been immunized. There is a need to accelerate the immunization.

The distribution of the vaccine has been I think a remarkable also collaboration and partnership between McKesson, CVS, CVS, Walgreens, FedEx, and UPS, and here [inaudible] the operation, and DoD in general.

The companies have played a critical role in delivering exactly on time, as was described yesterday, in over 14,000 different locations the exact quantities of the vaccines on the dates that were suggested. Where things need to improve is in the capacity of the healthcare system in general, without getting to the politics of whether it should be the states or the federal, or whoever's fault it is.

We need to improve the speed with which we are able to deliver these vaccines into the arms of people. That's our number one key area going forward. I would say other areas that require absolute continuous focus are to continue to streamline and optimize the supply chain with the messenger RNA vaccine, but also with the other vaccine.

It's vital that we have more variety of platform technologies underpinning vaccines for use in the population in general. It is very important, in the context of a pandemic, to be able to have a one- dose vaccine. It's a development that could take place, frankly, with the current messenger RNA vaccine, given the performance observed over a short period of time with one dose.

That would be a new kind of challenge and development. Also, vaccines are being developed as a one-dose vaccine such as J&J vaccine. Finally, another area where we are very focused is identification of clinical correlates of protection.

That's a really critical enabler for the future of other vaccines, given that the availability of vaccines now, particularly in the US, is making it effectively impossible to recruit high-risk subjects into placebo-controlled clinical trial. It would be the pragmatic way to demonstrate efficacy of yet more vaccines.

We hope that the last vaccine that started phase III, the Novavax vaccine, will not be derailed by the fact that subjects in the trial will leave the trial to get access to a known vaccine, versus an unknown vaccine or a placebo, and therefore, through that, make the vaccine study outcome highly improbable.

Identification of immuno-correlates of protection, which will be available to all players, may enable the development of a second-generation of vaccines that can support vaccinations here in the US, as well as on a worldwide basis.

All-in-all, this has been an opportunity for the industry as a whole to demonstrate to the world in general, and to the US population in particular, its critical role in effectively saving the country and the world from a pandemic that has just brought our lives to a stop. Has killed so many, infected so many, disrupted so many.

It's very important to highlight the level of collaboration, of partnership, of focus, of commitment, of selflessness that has characterized the work of the industry and the US government in tackling this pandemic. I'll stop there.

I just tried to refresh everybody's memory and mind on what has been done, and the critical areas of focus going forward. Looking forward to have a discussion with that.

Chris Schott: Thanks, Dr. Slaoui. Some great opening remarks. I thought I'd just cut to the chase up front here with a question for everybody. When you do you expect the population at large to be vaccinated? What do you see as the single main gating factor to getting there?

Maybe we'll start with, Angela, then go to Stephan, then Karen, then Brian, with just that initial question.

Angela Hwang: Thanks, Chris. Thank you, again, for bringing us all together to have a very important conversation about a very important topic. I think that Moncef's introduction on the state of where we are with the pandemic sheds a lot of light in terms of how we should think about where we are with the pandemic and how long it would take for us to vaccinate everyone.

You've heard him talk about the complexities of this vaccination campaign globally. We have billions of people that we have to be able to vaccinate because of the pandemic. The ability for us to vaccinate at the speed that we need in order to gain the herd immunity and to stop transmission is, obviously, up highest priorities.

As I think about everyone coming together, and I think that this panel is a great example of this industry, public-private partnership that we all need, because it truly needs all of us to be able to make this impact in the world. It's going to take time. There is a lot of people to vaccinate.