Novavax COVID-19 vaccine shown highly effective in trial

Novavax on Monday revealed the results of a phase three COVID-19 vaccine trial that determined that the company’s two-dose inoculation is highly effective.

The trial, in which 29,960 participants were enrolled across 119 sites in the U.S. and Mexico, found the Novavax vaccine to be 90.4 percent effective overall, and 100 percent effective in protecting against moderate and severe disease.

The vaccine was also found to be 91 percent effective among high-risk populations, defined as individuals over the age of 65, or younger if they have certain comorbidities.

The results are on par with the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which saw 95 percent and 94.1 percent efficacies, respectively, in phase three clinical trials.

Novavax, in a news release Monday morning, said it plans to file for regulatory authorizations in the third quarter, once the final phases of testing and process qualifications are met.

Upon approval, the company said it is on track to manufacture 100 million doses per month by the end of the third quarter, and 150 million per month by the end of the fourth quarter of this year.

“Today, Novavax is one step closer to addressing the critical and persistent global public health need for additional COVID-19 vaccines. These clinical results reinforce that NVX-CoV2373 is extremely effective and offers complete protection against both moderate and severe COVID-19 infection,” Stanley C. Erck, president and CEO of Novavax, said in a statement.

“Novavax continues to work with a sense of urgency to complete our regulatory submissions and deliver this vaccine, built on a well understood and proven platform, to a world that is still in great need of vaccines,” he added.

In March, Novavax announced the results of its COVID-19 vaccine trial in the United Kingdom, which found that the inoculation was 89.7 percent effective, but showed lower efficacy rates for variants of concern.

The company also looked at sequencing data for the 54 of 77 COVID-19 cases from the study, and determined that its inoculation was effective against 93.2 percent of cases with variants of concern or interest.