Half a Million Sharks Could Be Killed to Make a Global COVID Vaccine - VICE World News

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Thank you to Vice and journalist Gavin Butler, they penned an all-encompassing piece on our recent #SharkFreeVaccines announcement. Please click the button below to read the full story.

“Data published by the Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society (RAPS) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) indicates that of the 176 candidate vaccines in clinical and preclinical evaluation, 17 use adjuvants. And according to research by US non-profit organisation Shark Allies, at least five of those adjuvants are shark squalene-based.

One of them is MF59: an adjuvant that typically contains 9.75 milligrams of squalene per dose, and which is currently being used by the University of Queensland, in partnership with biotherapy companies CSL and Seqirus, for the development of a coronavirus vaccine candidate.

If every person on Earth was given a single dose of that vaccine, an estimated 249,351 sharks would have to be killed. If two doses of the vaccine are needed to immunise the global population—a likely outcome, according to some medical experts—the prospective death toll climbs to nearly half a million sharks.

‘This is not speculation,’ Stefanie Brendl, founder and Executive Director of Shark Allies, told VICE News over email. “However, it's not like 500,000 sharks are going to be hunted down in some particular region just so they can be killed for vaccines. No one is going out to specifically kill sharks right now just to get enough for a vaccine. [But] that is not the point.’”