Novavax Inc. said on Thursday that its COVID-19 vaccine appears to be 89% effective based on early findings from a British study and that it also appears to work – though not as well – against new mutant versions of the circulating virus. in that country and South Africa.
The announcement comes amid concerns that a variety of vaccines launched around the world will be strong enough to protect against new worrying variants. – and since the world desperately needs new types of photos to increase rare reserves.
The study of 15,000 people in the UK is still ongoing. But an interim analysis found that 62 participants had been diagnosed with COVID-19 so far – only six of them in the vaccine group and the others in fictitious photos.
The infections occurred at a time when the UK was facing a jump in COVID-19 caused by a more contagious variant. A preliminary analysis found that more than half of the study participants who were infected had the mutated version. The numbers are very small, but Novavax said it suggests the vaccine is almost 96% effective against the older coronavirus and almost 86% effective with the new variant. The findings are based on cases that occurred at least one week after the second dose.
“Both numbers are dramatic demonstrations of our vaccine’s ability to develop a very strong immune response,” Novavax CEO Stanley Erck said in a call with investors late Thursday.
Scientists have been even more concerned about a variant first discovered in South Africa, which has various mutations. The results of a smaller Novavax study in this country suggest that the vaccine works, but not as well as in the UK version.
The study in South Africa included several HIV volunteers. Among HIV-negative volunteers, the vaccine appears to be 60% effective. Including HIV volunteers, overall protection was 49 percent, the company said. While genetic testing is still ongoing, about 90% of the COVID-19 diseases found in the South African study to date occur due to the new mutant.
“It simply came to our notice then. There is reason to be optimistic about the 60% efficiency, said Glenda Gray, head of the African Medical Research Council. Even against the new variant that now causes more than 90% of new cases in that country, “we still see the effectiveness of the vaccine,” she said.
More worrying is what the study showed about a completely different question – the chances of people receiving COVID-19 a second time, said South African study leader Shabir Madhi of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The tests suggested that almost a third of the study participants had been previously infected, however the rates of new infections in the placebo group were similar.
“Past infection with early variants of the virus in South Africa does not protect” against infection with the new one, he said. “There seems to be no derivative protection.”
Novavax said it needed some more data before it could apply for British authorization for the vaccine, sometime next month or so. A larger study in the United States and Mexico enrolled just over half of the 30,000 volunteers needed. Novavax said it was unclear whether the Food and Drug Administration would need data from this study before deciding whether to allow US use.
In the meantime, it is beginning to develop a version of the vaccine that could target more precisely the mutations found in South Africa, if health authorities finally decide that an updated dosage is needed.
COVID-19 vaccines train the body to recognize the new coronavirus, especially the spike protein that covers it. But the Novavax candidate is made differently from the first photos used. Called the recombinant protein vaccine, the Maryland company uses genetic engineering to grow harmless copies of the spike coronavirus protein in insect cells. Scientists extract and purify the protein and then mix it into a chemical that boosts immunity.
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AP medical writer Marilynn Marchione contributed.
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