Novavax’s COVID vaccine showed great efficacy against coronavirus, including its variants, according to the results of a large study.
The injection was 90 percent effective in preventing symptomatic COVID and 100 percent effective in preventing moderate and severe symptomsthe US biotechnology firm reported on Monday. The injection was 93 percent effective against variants of concernadded.
The vaccine employs recombinant protein technology, also used in the candidate vaccine developed by Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline.
Going above 90 percent, the overall efficacy of the vaccine is close to the rates reported for messenger RNA injections developed by Pfizer and BioNTech and by Moderna, as well as Russia’s ‘Sputnik V’ vaccine, which uses technology from viral vectors. However, immunologists tend to caution against comparing efficacy results in different trials, since the conditions and the evaluation methods are not the same.
Novavax’s phase 3 trial included nearly 30,000 participants from the United States and Mexico, and analyzed the efficacy of the vaccine against the main variants circulating in the United States, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC). Only one case of the highly contagious delta strain was detected, which was first identified in India and remains rare in the US, among trial participants, so the efficacy of the injection is not conclusive.
In the results of a 15,000-person trial in the UK published in March, the injection was shown to be 90 percent effective in preventing COVID symptoms in all variants and the original version of the virus.
The company previously stated that it will not apply for authorization for its vaccine in the US and Europe until the third quarter of this year. Novavax assured that it is on track to reach a manufacturing capacity of 100 million doses per month by the end of the third trimester and 150 million per month by the end of 2021.
“Novavax is one step closer to addressing the critical and persistent global public health need for additional COVID vaccines,” Executive Director Stanley C. Erck said in a statement.
“Novavax continues to work with a sense of urgency to complete our regulatory filings and deliver this vaccine, built on a well-known and proven platform, to a world that still has a great need for vaccines.”
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