Rotavirus vaccine,live(Merck & Co.)

With demand plummetting in China for Merck's HPV vaccine Gardasil, the New Jersey company has adjusted its distribution deal with its partner in the country, Zhifei. The plummeting demand for Merck & Co.’s HPV vaccine Gardasil in China has forced the New Jersey drugmaker to rework its arrangement with its partner in the country, Chongqing Zhifei Biological Products.The companies have agreed to remove minimum purchase commitments and use a rolling, demand-based supply model for the three Merck vaccines that Zhifei distributes in China. In addition to Gardasil, Zhifei distributes rotavirus shot, RotaTeq, and pneumococcal vaccine Pneumovax 23.The adjustment of the arrangement between the companies enhances their ability “to respond to market fluctuations in a synergistic manner, while simultaneously alleviating” Zhifei’s operational pressures and mitigating its risks, the Chongqing-based company explained in a regulatory filing.The companies were operating under a multiyear deal, which specified a total procurement commitment of 97.9 billion Chinese yuan ($14.2 billion), running from 2023 to 2026. The new arrangement will run until the end of 2028. Zhifei, which was established in 1995, has been Merck’s distribution partner since 2011.The first trace of a demand shortfall for Gardasil in China came in 2024, when Merck reported a decline in vaccine sales, which reached the market in 2014. After a 3% decline in sales for Gardasil in 2024, the shortfall hit with full force in 2025, as its sales plummeted from $8.6 billion to $5.2 billion, for a 39% drop-off, with Merck blaming competition in China for cheaper alternatives.For China specifically, Zhifei reported that its total procurement of all Merck vaccines had fallen sharply from 34.8 billion yuan in 2023 to below 2.2 billion yuan last year, compared with a minimum procurement amount of 26 billion yuan set for Gardasil alone under the original deal between the two companies. The changing vaccine landscape in China also forced Zhifei to adjust its distribution deal with GSK in 2024, as the companies agreed to an extension of their partnership but at reduced volumes. Zhifei has felt the pinch, with its revenue peaking in 2023 at $7.4 billion before falling by more than 50% each of the last two years. 

iStock, Yutthana Gaetgeaw In his annual letter, Flagship Pioneering’s Noubar Afeyan lays out a choice between near-term “human-made miracles” and a reversion to the pain and suffering of past diseases due to “growing contempt” in the U.S. for the scientific method. Twenty twenty-five was a time of science generating “human-made miracles,” Flagship Pioneering CEO Noubar Afeyan wrote in his annual letter Monday. However, he added that he also believes the U.S. is “at risk of taking a sledgehammer to our miracle machine.” Attributing the term “man-made miracle” to a former head of state he met at UN General Assembly Week last fall, Afeyan said in his letter that the phrase stuck with him because “it is an apt description of what biotechnology, at its best, can do: miraculously consign to history some of the worst fates that befall humans – debilitating illnesses, devastating diseases.” The dignitary referenced Gilead Sciences’ twice-yearly HIV injection lenacapavir, according to Afeyan, who added a couple of his own human-made miracles to the list: the first-ever personalized CRISPR treatment , created for a nine-month-old boy named KJ with an ultrarare genetic condition, and clinical trials of organ xenotransplants engineered across species lines. As the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference gets underway in San Francisco, Afeyan issued a stark warning about the environment in which these “miracles” were made. “This past year, those conditions were under threat in the United States in ways I have never seen in my nearly 40 years in biotech, nor ever imagined I’d witness,” he wrote. Afeyan went on to cite proposed U.S. government budget cuts to the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, “slashed funding” for basic research, fewer grants in every area of science and medicine and the cancelation of thousands of existing projects. Indeed, in August 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services began a “coordinated wind-down” of nearly two dozen mRNA vaccine research projects under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. “Even more disastrous,” Afeyan wrote, “is the rejection of the academic scientific enterprise, the severing of its 70-year partnership with the U.S. government, and the growing contempt for the scientific method.” “Skepticism is an important part of the scientific method,” he continued. “Debate about approaches and outcomes is central to how science works. But what we are seeing is skepticism that has curdled into an across-the-board, corrosive doubt in the scientific method itself.” “If we lose our ability to collectively resolve our skepticism through the scientific method,” Afeyan concluded, “we won’t just slow the miracle machine, we’ll throw it into reverse.” Real-World Effects Afeyan pointed to the reappearance of measles as one example of this phenomenon. A deadly disease declared eliminated 25 years ago, measles could soon lose that status, he wrote, if the case numbers continue to climb. “The resurgence of measles is not the result of, say, a random genetic mutation,” Afeyan wrote in his letter. “It is the result of choices, policy decisions, to turn our backs on decades of science.” Vaccines Vaccine Investors Keep Their Heads Down as Trump Cuts Shot Schedule The US dramatically altered its recommendations for a series of vaccines, which drive billion-dollar earnings for giants like Merck and Pfizer. January 6, 2026 · 3 min read · Dan Samorodnitsky Afeyan is not the only scientific leader who has recently expressed concern about the potential for a reversal of scientific progress. After the U.S. federal government reduced the number of childhood vaccinations it recommends from 17 diseases to 11—leaving out shots for flu, rotavirus and more—medical experts eviscerated the decision . “If there’s a fairly rapid erosion in vaccine rates, I think you would immediately see children suffering preventable illness,” Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told The Atlantic , recalling the devastation rotavirus used to cause during his pediatric residency. Offit was part of the team that created a vaccine for the disease, RotaTeq, which was licensed in 2006. Afeyan concluded his letter by raising a parallel threat facing the U.S. biopharma sector: China. “At the same time that some in the U.S. are undermining the scientific method, the Chinese government has been investing heavily in it,” he wrote. In the past nine years, the number of novel medicines in China has increased eightfold, nearly equaling U.S. input, according to Afeyan. Between 2015 and 2018, the workforce at China’s drug regulator—the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA)—quadrupled, Afeyan added, allowing it to clear a backlog of 20,000 new drug applications in two years. He noted that the FDA reviews “only a few hundred new drug applications each year.” In contrast to China’s buildup, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy slashed some 3,500 positions at the FDA in a mass workforce overhaul soon after taking office, though this did not appear to have an impact on the rate of novel approvals granted by the agency in 2025. Special edition Deep Dive: Chinese Biotech Innovation Can’t Be Stopped In this deep dive, BioSpace investigates China’s rise as a biotech powerhouse. October 27, 2025 · 3 min read · Annalee Armstrong “If we continue to discredit and defund the scientific method,” Afeyan wrote, “the U.S. risks becoming an innovation desert, reliant on China for new medicines and technologies and helpless to protect our own people in times of crisis, ranging from biological warfare to the next pandemic.”