Maryland-based Novavax has never launched a vaccine on the market. The Trump administration has awarded the company $ 1.6 billion to develop and test the vaccine, start large-scale manufacturing and reserve 100 million doses.
Test details: Novavax tested its vaccine in the United Kingdom during a period when a different variant of the virus – first detected in Britain and more transmissible than previous versions – began to circulate. The company’s analysis of the 15,000-person Phase III trial found that the vaccine was 95.6 percent effective against the original Covid-19 strain and 85.6 percent effective against the UK variant, B.1.1.7.
The first data from a separate Phase IIb clinical trial of 4,400 people in South Africa found that the vaccine was only 49.4 percent effective against the variant first discovered in that country. More than 92 percent of the sequenced PCR samples taken from Covid patients in the South African study were identified as this variant, which is known as B.1.351.
Novavax says it is developing booster doses of its vaccine to better protect against new strains of Covid and plans to start testing them in people in the second quarter of 2021.