In an an­ti-cli­mat­ic end to a bud­ding takeover fight, Unilever has all but giv­en up on a buy­out of Glax­o­SmithK­line’s con­sumer health­care busi­ness.

Unilever, the con­sumer prod­uct gi­ant be­hind house­hold brands like Ben & Jer­ry’s, Lip­ton and Vase­line, said in a state­ment late Wednes­day that it will not in­crease its of­fer above £50 bil­lion ($68 bil­lion) — which GSK had re­vealed days ago as its third and lat­est of­fer.

At the time GSK dis­missed its pro­posed M&A deal, Unilever in­sist­ed on its be­lief that it would be an “at­trac­tive and syn­er­gis­tic com­bi­na­tion,” hint­ing that it’s still de­ter­mined to pur­sue a buy­out.

Ac­cord­ing to Unilever, the de­ci­sion to now walk away is all about main­tain­ing “strict fi­nan­cial dis­ci­pline.”

“We note the re­cent­ly shared fi­nan­cial as­sump­tions from the cur­rent own­ers of GSK Con­sumer Health­care and have de­ter­mined that it does not change our view on fun­da­men­tal val­ue,” read the press re­lease.

But ob­servers and an­a­lysts sus­pect the pal­pa­ble back­lash from Unilever share­hold­ers af­ter GSK pub­li­cized the pro­posed M&A deal was the chief rea­son for the sud­den re­treat.

“In­vestors stopped the bid through the share price and the feed­back they gave,” Bern­stein an­a­lyst Bruno Monteyne told the Fi­nan­cial Times, adding that a call held by his firm with Unilever share­hold­ers the day be­fore was marked by “a tor­rent of crit­i­cism along the lines of: ‘What on earth are they think­ing?’”

GSK projects that the con­sumer health­care unit, which it plans to spin out as an in­de­pen­dent com­pa­ny, could de­liv­er or­gan­ic sales growth of 4% to 6% over the medi­um term.

At the end of January, the European Medicines Agency officially launched its new clinical trials info system (CTIS), although the migration to the new platform has only really just begun, and sponsors have until the end of January 2023 before all initial trial applications must be submitted through CTIS.

Overall, 56 clinical trial applications have been submitted in CTIS during the first 3 months since the launch of the system on Jan. 31, according to new data posted by the EMA. By comparison, about 4,000 new trials are authorized each year across Europe.

As concerns related to uptake and distribution continue to linger, Switzerland is among the first countries that plans to destroy hundreds of thousands of expired and unused Covid-19 vaccine doses.

The European country said it plans to destroy more than 600,000 doses of Moderna’s Spikevax Covid-19 vaccine as the doses have reached their expiration date.

However, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that he’s in the process of throwing 30 million doses in the garbage, exclaiming, “We have a big demand problem.”

More than 500 stakeholders sent comments to the FTC on whether the commission should look further into pharma middlemen, known as PBMs, with many of the commenters calling for more federal oversight.

Similar to the critical open comment period in a deadlocked FTC session last February, pharmacies and pharmacy groups are continuing to call out the lack of transparency among the top 3 PBMs, which control about 80% of the market.

HHS on Thursday finalized its decision to withdraw a rule, proposed just before former President Donald Trump left office, that would’ve caused thousands of HHS and FDA regulations to automatically expire if they weren’t reviewed within two years, and every 10 years thereafter.

The decision follows the filing of a lawsuit last March, in which several nonprofits alleged that the outgoing administration planted “a ticking timebomb” for HHS, essentially forcing it to devote an enormous amount of resources to the unprecedented and infeasible task of reviewing thousands of regulations regularly.