Three months later, inside the Desert King conference room in early July, sitting across from a shelf displaying Slurpee cups and bottles of Stewart’s Root Beer, Hiley let out a chuckle through his surgical mask. In the end, Hiley knew there was only one way to answer Erck: “Of course, we can deliver it,” he said. And last year he had made the ill-timed decision to postpone expanding their pharmaceutical operations in favor of investing in Desert King’s booming animal-feed business. Hiley’s immediate concern was that his Chilean operation had already missed the bark-harvesting window-typically during the trees’ spring growth, between September and December. Novavax needed guarantees of 1,500 pounds of saponin now, and up to three times as much next year. It would also soon be on the short list of vaccine candidates funded by the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed. Novavax was on the cusp of receiving $384 million in international funding to help it produce 100 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine for the world by the end of the year, and a billion doses by the end of 2021. And the Hileys practically had a monopoly on it.ĭuring his call with the Hileys, Erck asked if Desert King could increase their production for Novavax a hundredfold. Novavax has its own saponin-based adjuvant, called Matrix-M, and warned investors last year that their vaccines could be delayed if they failed to “secure sufficient supplies” of high-quality extract. “If you take out all the trees in one shot and deplete the source of saponin, you are in deep shit in the future,” says Garo Armen, whose company, Agenus, helped bring QS-21 to market. Everyone in the business knew the story of the Pacific yew tree, whose bark was the original source of the chemotherapy drug paclitaxel, and which was threatened by large-scale harvesting in the 1980s. Nine years ago, researchers estimated that the global supply of pharmaceutical-grade Quillaja extract was sufficient for just 6 million doses of vaccine. Food and Drug Administration, and QS-21 is one of the newest.Ī single gram of powdered QS-21 costs more than $100,000, though only about $5 worth is needed for each shot. Owing to their potential risks to human health, however, only a handful of adjuvants have been approved by the U.S.

Adjuvants are compounds that boost the body’s immune reaction to a vaccine. This precious goo does many things well, and it happens to be the raw material for one of the world’s most coveted vaccine adjuvants: QS-21. Pulverized and soaked in water at the Desert King factory in Chile, the bark is transformed into a brown, bitter, bubbly fluid. The inner bark of the Chilean soapbark tree, Quillaja saponaria, is the source material for some of these saponins. And its success, Erck believed, depended on that odd ingredient in Slurpees. But like other companies around the world, Novavax had thrown its hat into the coronavirus-vaccine race. Not a seller of vaccines, mind you: The company had yet to bring one of its candidates to market. Erck is the CEO of Novavax, a Maryland-based maker of vaccines. Then, one day-April 14th, to be exact-his son told him that they had a call with Stanley Erck. “My theory of business is the only two people who need to know my name are my wife and my banker,” he told me recently. Most of us never think about these compounds, and Hiley has always liked it that way. Maybe his son, Damian, would take over.įor more than 42 years, Hiley has been a leading purveyor of certain plant-based food additives such as saponins, foaming agents used in root beer and Slurpees. California had issued its initial stay-at-home order for COVID-19, but apart from the hand sanitizer around the office, life was more or less normal. gov.In early April, Paul Hiley was kicking back in the executive suite at Desert King International LLC, gazing out the window at the San Diego sunshine and daydreaming about his golf game. Read the guide to the use of human and animal products in vaccines on. The ingredients for each vaccine can be found at the links below. What are the ingredients of the vaccines? The Pope and Muslim leaders have said the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is acceptable. The vaccine itself does not contain any foetal cells. The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine used cells replicated from a foetus which was legally aborted in 1973 to develop the vaccine. The GSK/Sanofi, Pfizer/BioNTech, and Moderna vaccines do not contain any foetal cells as they are not required in the manufacturing process. Were the approved Covid-19 vaccines made using foetal cells? The other vaccines do not contain any animal products or egg. The GSK/Sanofi vaccine contains an oil derived from sharks. Do the COVID-19 vaccines contain animal products?

Nova vax ingredients