Platinum Asset Management’s healthcare expert Bianca Ogden calls for support of locally made mRNA-based vaccine

Platinum’s Ogden is urging the federal government to support local manufacture of mRNAvaccines.

Platinum Asset Management’s healthcare expert Bianca Ogden calls for support of locally made mRNA-based vaccine. Picture: Jane Dempster/The Australian.

Platinum Asset Management’s healthcare expert Bianca Ogden has urged the federal government to back local manufacturing of the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr Ogden said the messenger RNA-based Covid vaccines developed by US company Moderna or Germany’s BioNTech had shown themselves to have much higher levels of efficacy against COVID-19.

Based on new technologies, they could also be more easily adapted to fight newer and more infectious strains of the virus now emerging.

“Australia should be taking a broader, more open-minded look at what is out there in terms of vaccines against Covid,” Dr Ogden said.

“It has been shown that the mRNA technologies work and have huge potential.”

Dr Ogden said Australia could back the local manufacturing of mRNA vaccines as an advanced industry of the future either through CSL or by backing some of the companies producing the mRNA vaccines to manufacture in Australia.

She said there would be a long-term demand for Covid vaccines given the need to have the initial injections and then boosters, like the annual flu ­vaccines.

“It is important to have access to these new technologies and be able to make these new vaccines on a yearly or two-yearly basis,” she said. “Now is the time to back this technology as an industry of the future.”

The mRNA-based vaccines have been shown to have more than 90 per cent effectiveness against COVID-19, while the trials of the AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccine have reported levels of about 62 per cent.

A German-born virologist, Dr Ogden was an early backer of mRNA technology, with Platinum’s healthcare fund an investor in Moderna and BioNTech, which was backed by Pfizer, although her fund has recently sold down its holdings given their price spikes over the past year.

Her comments come amid increasing concern that the government has been slow off the mark in diversifying its approach to buying COVID-19 vaccines, throwing its weight heavily behind the AstraZeneca vaccine.

It is now scrambling to get access to the more effective mRNA vaccines.

Traditional vaccines, including most flu vaccines, use inactivated viruses to trigger a person’s immune response to the disease.

The mRNA technology tricks the body into making the protein connected to the virus that then triggers the immune response.

The government has ordered 54 million doses of the more traditional vaccine being developed at Oxford University with British multinational AstraZeneca that will be manufactured in Australia by CSL. It has also ordered smaller quantities of the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer that it will import from overseas for the first round of ­vaccines to be delivered to healthcare and quarantine workers.

AstraZeneca’s chief executive, Pascal Soriet, is a director of CSL and a member of the Australian company’s innovation and development committee.

CSL is building an $800m plant in Melbourne that will manufacture the AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccine.

Dr Ogden said Australia’s late decision to buy the mRNA ­vaccines meant it had limited access at higher prices as countries around the world scramble to buy mRNA technology vaccines.

She said the higher prices of the mRNA vaccines on the world market were mainly because of supply and demand considerations and not because of the differences in manufacturing costs.

The president of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Immunology, Stephen Turner, said this week that the AstraZeneca vaccine was “not one” he would be “deploying widely” given its lower efficacy.

The government this week rejected suggestions that it should halt its orders for the AstraZeneca vaccine to wait until it could get ­access to larger quantities of the mRNA vaccines.

Dr Ogden said there were also different vaccines being developed by other companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi that Australia should also be con­sidering.

She has been urging the government to diversify its sources of the vaccine, a strategy that would have given it more access to supplies from vaccine makers other than AstraZeneca.

But she said there was no point looking back.

“I guess the train has left the station now,” she said.

But Dr Ogden said the government should look at talking to other suppliers and encouraging more local manufacturing, given that COVID-19 could be around for many years to come.

The German government invested €300m into German vaccine maker CureVac in June last year and had given local manufacturer BioNTech another €375m in September to help it step up its manufacturing.

Both companies are producing mRNA technology vaccines.

“These are the type of strategic moves which Australia should be contemplating right now,” Dr Ogden said.

“We should be open to considering new vaccines.

“But it feels that people are not thinking enough into the ­future.”