De­spite years of pub­lic health mes­sag­ing and aware­ness ad­ver­tis­ing, peo­ple over the age of 50 still aren’t get­ting the shin­gles shots — or even wide­ly un­der­stand­ing the risks.

GSK re­search shows that “a stag­ger­ing 61% of adults don’t know or don’t think they are at risk for shin­gles.” So it’s dou­bling down on ad­ver­tis­ing, this time with a di­rect mes­sage about the dor­mant virus that caus­es shin­gles and is al­ready in­side 99% of peo­ple old­er than age 50.

Two new TV ads — one in Eng­lish and a dif­fer­ent one in Span­ish — show peo­ple with their eyes closed do­ing every­day things at a cook­out, gro­cery shop­ping and even play­ing sports with the warn­ing that “it’s time to wake up — be­cause shin­gles could wake up in you.”

The lat­est cam­paign launched last week is GSK’s first fo­cused on the dor­man­cy of the virus. Con­cur­rent TV ads fo­cus more on the burn­ing, painful rash of shin­gles that can last for weeks. The smol­der­ing burn and elec­tric shock im­ages de­pict­ing the pain be­gan run­ning last year, with Span­ish-lan­guage ver­sions with a sim­i­lar pain mes­sage about “la cule­bril­la” be­gan ear­li­er this year.

The new Span­ish-lan­guage ad is more than just a trans­lat­ed ad, a GSK spokesper­son said in an email.

“We know that to be most rel­e­vant to His­pan­ic au­di­ences, we need­ed to do bet­ter than sim­ply adding a Span­ish voice over. So, we de­vel­oped a ded­i­cat­ed Span­ish-lan­guage cam­paign. The Span­ish-lan­guage ads fea­ture all His­pan­ic ac­tors and sce­nar­ios that are par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant to the His­pan­ic com­mu­ni­ty,” they said.

GSK re­search shows that His­pan­ic peo­ple in the US are sig­nif­i­cant­ly less like­ly to be vac­ci­nat­ed against shin­gles com­pared to oth­ers and that His­pan­ic peo­ple are are less fa­mil­iar with shin­gles symp­toms and risk fac­tors.

The new cam­paign in­cludes broad­cast and stream­ing TV, ra­dio and point-of-care ads along with on­line video, dig­i­tal and so­cial me­dia work. The ads redi­rect peo­ple to GSK’s “What is Shin­gles” web­site for more de­tails.

While pre­vi­ous ads with the burn­ing and painful rash im­agery “con­vey that shin­gles is some­thing that you want to avoid. How­ev­er, in ad­di­tion to un­der­stand­ing the im­pact of shin­gles, we know that con­sumers need to al­so un­der­stand that they are at risk,” the spokesper­son said.

The work is un­brand­ed, but GSK makes lead­ing shin­gles vac­cine Shin­grix. GSK re­ports its Q3 sales next week, but Shin­grix sales topped €1.4 bil­lion in the first half of 2022, dri­ven by record sec­ond quar­ter sales. GSK said in its last fi­nan­cial fil­ing that “Specif­i­cal­ly for Shin­grix, we con­tin­ue to ex­pect strong dou­ble-dig­it growth and record an­nu­al sales in 2022, based on strong de­mand in ex­ist­ing mar­kets and con­tin­ued ge­o­graph­i­cal ex­pan­sion.”

The FDA hasn’t detected any potential safety signals, including for stroke, in people aged 65 years and older who have received Pfizer’s bivalent Covid booster, one senior official told members of the agency’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) on Thursday.

The update comes as the FDA and CDC investigate a “preliminary signal” that may indicate an increased risk of ischemic stroke in older Americans who received Pfizer’s updated shot.

The FDA has stopped use of another drug as a result of the new coronavirus variants. On Thursday, the agency announced that AstraZeneca’s antibody combo Evusheld, which was an important prevention option for many immunocompromised people and others, is no longer authorized.

The FDA said it made its decision based on the fact that Evusheld works on fewer than 10% of circulating variants.

Evusheld was initially given emergency authorization at the end of 2021. However, as Omicron emerged, so did studies that showed Evusheld might not work against the dominant Omicron strain. In October, the FDA warned healthcare providers that Evusheld was useless against the Omicron subvariant BA.4.6. It followed that up with another announcement earlier this month that it did not think Evusheld would work against the latest Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5.

Regeneron has won a patent case against Swiss pharma giant Novartis over the delivery system for its eye drug Eylea.

The US Patent Trial and Appeal Board ruled that Novartis’ pre-filled syringe for injecting its eye medication Lucentis was “unpatentable” and handed the victory to Regeneron and its AMD drug Eylea.

In the initial complaint in 2020, Novartis alleged to the US International Trade Commission that certain pre-filled syringes for the intravitreal injection, and ultimately Regeneron’s delivery system for Eylea, were infringing on Novartis’ patent. Regeneron filed a petition to review Novartis’ claims in 2021.

Bristol Myers Squibb is looking to expand Breyanzi into more indications — and the pharma’s newest data readout makes progress on that front.

The Big Pharma put out word Thursday that the CAR-T cell therapy met the primary endpoint of complete response rate compared to historical control in a subset of patients with relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) that were refractory to a BTK inhibitor and pretreated with a BCL-2 inhibitor.

What happens when you combine a country music star with a trending health issue and throw in a good measure of TikTok and Instagram?

For Sanofi’s “Knowing RSV” campaign, it’s meant broader awareness for a common virus that many parents don’t know much about. One common misconception, for example, is that respiratory syncytia virus (RSV) only affects infants who are born prematurely or have other health issues. However, 72% of infants hospitalized with RSV are healthy, full-term babies, said Ayanna Santos, head of Sanofi’s RSV franchise in the US.