Chi­na has opened up its doors to a for­eign Covid-19 vac­cine for the first time, though not for its own cit­i­zens, a Ger­man gov­ern­ment spokesper­son told Reuters on Wednes­day.

BioN­Tech’s mR­NA vac­cines have been sent to Chi­na to meet the goal of vac­ci­nat­ing 20,000 Ger­man ex­pa­tri­ates there, a spokesper­son for the Ger­man em­bassy in Wash­ing­ton con­firmed to End­points News. There will be ad­di­tion­al ship­ments, the spokesper­son said, with­out pro­vid­ing de­tails on when or how many dos­es would be de­liv­ered. The shots will be pro­vid­ed free to Ger­mans over 12 years old and will be shipped to Ger­man em­bassies and com­pa­nies across the coun­try.

About 11,500 dos­es ar­rived re­cent­ly for Ger­man ex­pa­tri­ates in Bei­jing, Shang­hai, Guangzhou, Shenyang and Cheng­du, BioN­Tech said Thurs­day.

The news comes over a month af­ter Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Olaf Scholz an­nounced in Bei­jing that an agree­ment had been made be­tween the two coun­tries to al­low the vac­cine’s use in Chi­na for ex­pats. Scholz said at the time that he hoped the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment would al­low its own cit­i­zens to use the vac­cine, ac­cord­ing to Reuters.

Ear­li­er in De­cem­ber, the Ger­man gov­ern­ment au­tho­rized Chi­nese cit­i­zens liv­ing in Ger­many to have ac­cess to Chi­na’s Sino­vac shot, one of the first vac­cines au­tho­rized for emer­gency use by the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment in 2020. A 2021 study in Chi­na found that two dos­es and a boost­er of Sino­vac’s shot didn’t pro­duce ad­e­quate lev­els of pro­tec­tive an­ti­bod­ies against the omi­cron vari­ant.

Chi­nese cit­i­zens pre­vi­ous­ly on­ly had ac­cess to vac­cines de­vel­oped in their home coun­try, and none of the vac­cines ap­proved for wide do­mes­tic use in Chi­na are mR­NA-based, ac­cord­ing to a re­port from BNN Bloomberg.

In Oc­to­ber, Mod­er­na backed out of on­go­ing ne­go­ti­a­tions to send its mR­NA vac­cines be­cause Chi­na asked for all of the in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty rights. Hand­ing over de­tailed IP is one of on­ly two ways that Chi­na cur­rent­ly al­lows for­eign vac­cines. The oth­er op­tion is to build a man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny in the coun­try with a Chi­nese part­ner.

There have been some ex­cep­tions in the coun­try’s spe­cial ad­min­is­tra­tive re­gions.

BioN­Tech part­nered with Shang­hai Fo­s­un Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and an­nounced in No­vem­ber that the Health Bu­reau of the Hong Kong Spe­cial Ad­min­is­tra­tive Re­gion is­sued an Emer­gency Use Au­tho­riza­tion for a boost­er dose of BioN­Tech’s Omi­cron BA.4/BA.5-adapt­ed bi­va­lent vac­cine.

And Macau al­so grant­ed the boost­er a Spe­cial Im­port Au­tho­riza­tion.

Ed­i­tor’s note: Up­dat­ed with a state­ment from BioN­Tech.

New York City is investing $20 million in biotech this year in the form of a 50,000-square-foot “innovation space” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, complete with offices, research laboratories and events and programming space to grow biotech startups and companies.

Mayor Eric Adams said during his State of The City Address last Thursday that there will be an “emphasis” on making more opportunities for women and people of color to further diversify the industry. The City first reported the news.

Boehringer Ingelheim uncorked some positive results suggesting that Spevigo can help prevent flare-ups in patients with a severe form of psoriasis, months after the drug was approved to treat existing flares.

Spevigo, an IL-36R antibody also known as spesolimab, met its primary and a key secondary endpoint in the Phase IIb EFFISAYIL 2 trial in patients with generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP), Boehringer announced on Monday. While the company is keeping the hard numbers under wraps until later this year, it said in a news release that it anticipates sharing the results with regulators.

AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi won an appeals court win on Monday, as the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found that the companies cannot be forced to provide 340B-discounted drugs purchased by hospitals from an unlimited number of community and specialty pharmacies.

“Legal duties do not spring from silence,” the decision says as the court makes clear that the federal government’s interpretation of the “supposed requirement” that the 340B program compels drugmakers to supply their discounted drugs to an unlimited number of contract pharmacies is not correct, noting:

A US appeals court has ruled against Johnson & Johnson’s use of bankruptcy to deal with mounting talc lawsuits, deciding that doing so would “create a legal blind spot.”

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a previous bankruptcy court decision on Monday, calling for the dismissal of a Chapter 11 filing by J&J’s subsidiary LTL Management.

Faced with more than 38,000 lawsuits alleging its talc-based products caused cancer, J&J spun its talc liabilities into a separate company called LTL Management back in October 2021 and filed for bankruptcy, a controversial move colloquially referred to as a “Texas two-step” bankruptcy. Claimants argued that the strategy is a misuse of the US bankruptcy code — and on Monday, a panel of judges agreed.