Congress should ask vaccine makers these questions

This will be a newsy week in the race to develop a vaccine against the novel coronavirus. Data on a vaccine from AstraZeneca and Oxford University are expected to be published today in the Lancet. And top brass from five drug companies are due at a congressional hearing Tuesday, with plans to update lawmakers on progress toward a vaccine. Executives from AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Moderna, and Pfizer will field questions — hopefully giving the public a better idea of the timeline, and cost, of receiving an inoculation against Covid-19.

STAT’s Helen Branswell and Damian Garde highlight six burning questions that the congressional panel might pose. There are still many unknowns, after all — such as how developing countries will get the vaccine, how new data will be released, and will there be snags as vaccine production scales up.