COVID-19: Moderna asks FDA to authorize vaccine for young kids, Merck antiviral pill sales top $3B

Yahoo Finance's Anjalee Khemlani details the latest information surrounding Moderna's FDA filing to authorize a COVID vaccine for children, as well as looking at Merck's Q1 earnings beat attributed to its COVID treatment pill.

Video Transcript

- Switching gears, everyone, Moderna has submitted an emergency use authorization request for its children's COVID-19 vaccine following additional data revealed during their studies. Here with more, we've got Yahoo Finance's health care reporter Anjalee Khemlani. Anjalee, good to have you here with us. So what's the significance of Moderna's latest submission to the regulatory agency?

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Well, it marks the first COVID vaccine company to be able to submit for that age group. We know that under six-- under five, really-- is an unmet area. So right now, what the Moderna vaccine specifically is catering to is from six years to six months, and they are using 25 micrograms of that mRNA vaccine dose. That's about a quarter of the adult vaccine dose.

Meanwhile, we know the efficacy numbers have been some cause for concern, 51% effective in ages six months to under two years and 37% effective in two years to under six months-- to under six years. I've had conversations with health experts. No one seems to be really concerned about these numbers, especially in light of the fact that the clinical trials were conducted during the Omicron wave. So that's really important to remember, and that's why those numbers are so low.

In addition, one of the health experts I spoke to pointed to the fact that we kind of got carried away with the messaging on these numbers when the adult vaccine the first time, right, that 90% for mRNA doses, came up. And so we kind of lost the idea.

So the fact that it continues to protect against severe disease, that's really the key to keep focus on right now. And so that's where things stand right now. The EUA filing has just started. It is going to continue and be completed by next week.

And that's important to keep in mind because we do know that there were some reports that the FDA might wait for Pfizer to file before looking at this. But we just got word, a report saying from Bloomberg that the FDA commissioner is going to look at Moderna and start that review now. So we might actually get that vaccine first.

- Very good. OK, Merck, meanwhile, tops earnings expectations, largely on the COVID-19 antiviral pill. What do we know there?

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: So we know that that is kind of surprising news, especially because we found out early on that Pfizer's pill was one of the ones that was preferred, especially globally. We're still continuing to see that. So the fact that they do have this boost from this pill is interesting. That's molnupiravir. It accounted for 20% of Q1 revenue, or about $3 billion, and they've been able to ship about 6.4 million courses globally.

The 2022 outlook, however, is reduced just a bit from about 6 billion to 5 billion. So we're seeing that. And this is, of course, under that pressure from Pfizer's Paxlovid, which we know has been recommended by the World Health Organization as well as in the US.

- All right, significant movement there on the vaccine front, and additionally, on the oral antivirals that we've seen put forward as well. Anjalee, thanks for bringing this down for us.