Editor's note: Check back here for updated vaccine requirements in biotech, or submit your company's policy via email to [email protected]. Fierce Pharma is tracking employer vaccine requirements in pharma.
With a 97% vaccination rate among its staff, Alector elected not to mandate COVID-19 shots for employees. But the CEO is reaching out to every straggler in an effort to get that number up to 100%.
Vaccination, as CEO Arnon Rosenthal, Ph.D., sees it, is the "best way out of the pandemic crisis." So, he has attempted to encourage the 3% to get inoculated, said Michelle Corral, vice president of communications and investor relations. The neurodegenerative disease biotech has also indefinitely postponed its early-September return to office/reopening.
The Delta variant has sent shockwaves across the world as people began to emerge from more than a year of isolation. The workplace has become a new line of defense against the pandemic.
President Joe Biden required that all federal workers be vaccinated or submit to regular testing and the Veterans Administration did the same. Google, Facebook, Anthem and other private behemoths piled on.
The issue is particularly striking at the very companies that developed vaccines and therapies to combat COVID-19: pharmaceutical companies and biotechs.
Fierce Biotech surveyed a range of biotechs to see how they are responding to the wave of vaccination mandates. Big Pharmas like Pfizer, Roche's Genentech and Gilead Sciences are implementing vax rules. But biotech seems to be a mixed bag.
Cancer detection and screening company Exact Sciences is requiring the vaccine, citing studies showing death rates as high as one-in-six for cancer patients infected with the virus.
"As a company committed to fighting cancer, we are requiring that all employees be vaccinated," Exact Sciences said in a statement.
Q Bio, maker of a "digital twin" whole-body imaging platform, has also mandated the vaccine.
Yet others, like Ovid, know "the best medical advice today" shows that COVID-19 vaccines provide protection and help stop the virus from spreading. But, the biotech has stopped short of a full vaccine mandate. Instead, Ovid will only require full vaccination for employees coming into company offices while awaiting the full U.S. approval of the vaccines by the FDA.
"However, the current employer policy conversations are just the beginning of what will likely be a prolonged discourse about mandatory vaccination," said CEO and Chairman Jeremy Levin.
Anthony Fauci, M.D., chief medical adviser to the president and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has said he's hopeful for full vaccine approval before September.
Over at NRx, which is working on a COVID-19 anti-viral, employees "have uniformly confirmed they are vaccinated, and we very much believe in the importance of those vaccines." But the company, which is still being operated as a remote workforce, hasn't enforced a mandate.
MOMA Therapeutics is avoiding a mandate, too, despite believing "people who are not vaccinated put our workforce at risk," said Asit Parikh, M.D., Ph.D., CEO and president of the "molecular machines" biotech. The company requires employees and visitors to show proof of vaccination, but it doesn't have a mandate given "all new employees are opting in."
While Alector's Rosenthal speaks to the remaining 3%, other biotechs have already hit the 100% mark, which gives them the confidence to not require vaccines. CAMP4 and Double Rainbow Biosciences both reported that their staff are fully vaccinated.
As Ovid takes a wait-and-see approach pending approval of the vaccines, Levin foresees a broader debate coming.
"The next looming question we must all address is, will we require maintenance with boosters in addition to initial vaccination?" Levin wondered.