It’s been a good week for Covid-19 vac­cines, and per­haps an even bet­ter one for the hack­ers try­ing to steal Covid-19 vac­cine da­ta.

In a brief note Wednes­day, the Eu­ro­pean Med­i­cines Agency an­nounced that it had been “the sub­ject of a cy­ber-at­tack.” Pfiz­er and their Ger­man biotech part­ner BioN­Tech con­firmed their da­ta had been “un­law­ful­ly ac­cessed’ as part of the breach, al­though they cau­tioned to Reuters that they did not be­lieve par­tic­i­pants’ per­son­al in­for­ma­tion had been changed and that the EMA had as­sured them the hack would not in­ter­fere with the time­line for ap­proval.

Stolen doc­u­ments could po­ten­tial­ly give use­ful in­for­ma­tion to oth­er coun­tries de­vel­op­ing a vac­cine, as well as in­for­ma­tion on oth­er com­pa­nies and sys­tems in­volved in de­vel­op­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing it.

The lat­est in­ci­dent adds to a string of vac­cine-di­rect­ed cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty at­tacks that have re­port­ed­ly struck through­out the pan­dem­ic. News re­ports of such ef­forts have picked up in re­cent weeks.

In May, as vac­cine ef­forts were ac­cel­er­at­ing, US of­fi­cials warned Chi­nese hack­ers were tar­get­ing vac­cine re­search, prompt­ing a swift de­nial from the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.

In Ju­ly, though, Britain’s Na­tion­al Cy­ber Se­cu­ri­ty Cen­tre re­leased a re­port ac­cus­ing Russ­ian-backed groups, in­clud­ing one known as “Cozy Bear,” of tar­get­ing phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies work­ing on vac­cines. The Cen­tre said that US and Cana­di­an of­fi­cials shared their as­sess­ment, and The Tele­graph re­port­ed that the As­traZeneca-Ox­ford ef­fort had been at­tacked. Rus­sia de­nied in­volve­ment.

Then last month, Mi­crosoft said that a Russ­ian group named “Fan­cy Bear” and two North Ko­re­an groups named “Zinc” and “Ceri­um” at­tempt­ed to break in­to sys­tems at 7 phar­mas and re­searchers in 5 coun­tries. That in­clud­ed brute force ef­forts to at­tempt mil­lions of po­ten­tial pass­words and phish­ing schemes where hack­ers would pose as World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion of­fi­cials and so­lic­it peo­ple’s pass­words.

Last week, IBM said that hack­ers backed by for­eign gov­ern­ments had turned their at­ten­tion to the com­pa­nies that main­tain the cold chain nec­es­sary to ship and store mR­NA vac­cines. Among oth­er ef­forts, ad­ver­saries posed as an ex­ec­u­tive from the ma­jor cold chain com­pa­ny Haier Med­ical and so­licit­ed user­names and pass­words. The at­tacks were glob­al, IBM said.

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.

FDA Commissioner Rob Califf joined the heads of the CDC and NIH in the hot seat today before a key House subcommittee, explaining that there needs to be a much faster, more coordinated way to oversee vaccine safety, and that foreign biopharma inspections, halted for years due to the pandemic, are slowly ramping up again.

Califf, who stressed to the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health that the CDC also needs better data, made clear that the FDA’s ability to monitor the safety of vaccines “would also benefit greatly by a coordinated federal public health data reporting authority.”