In boost for India, Novavax finds vaccine 89% effective
NEW DELHI: Two more developers of coronavirus vaccines announced on Friday that their doses were effective in preventing Covid-19, adding to the world’s arsenal to fight the pandemic with at least one of them – Novavax – likely to be widely available in India by the summer if all goes to plan.
Novavax said its two-shot vaccine showed an overall efficacy rate of 89%, with a high of 96% against the dominant global variant of the virus. The efficacy dipped to 86% in the case of the B.1.1.7 variant first seen in the UK, and further to 60% in the case of the B.1.351 variant spreading in South Africa.
The other company to announce efficacy results was Johnson & Johnson (J&J) which said its vaccine – developed in partnership with Janssen -showed an aggregate efficacy rate of 66% when given as a single dose. It too reported a drop in efficacy rate – to 57% -- when dealing with the South African variant.
Novavax has a deal with Pune’s Serum Institute of India (SII) for the manufacture of at least a billion doses of its vaccine for lowand middle-income countries and India. Hours after the efficacy results were announced, SII CEO Adar Poonawalla told Reuters that his company has applied for permission to conduct a trial in India.
“We have already applied to the drug controller’s office for the bridging trial, a few days ago… So they should also give that approval soon now,” the news agency quoted him as saying. SII, which produces the largest volumes of vaccines every year, is also making a billion doses of the Oxford-astrazeneca vaccine, which it has supplied in millions to India, where it is the most widely used dose.
Poonawalla told Reuters earlier this month that his company would manufacture “upwards of 40-50 million doses per month” of the Novavax vaccine from around April, which raises hopes that India could have access to large quantities of a third vaccine by the summer.
In addition to the Oxford-astrazeneca vaccine, which is marketed as Covishield in India by
SII, the country is using Covaxin developed by Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech. This vaccine has not yet reached the trial endpoint to determine efficacy rate.
On a conference call, Novavax representatives noted that this was interim data and that they expect it will be two to three months before they are ready to apply for authorisation with regulators.
The UK trial, which enrolled 16,000 people aged 18 to 84, is expected to be used to apply for use in Britain, the European Union and other countries. The bridging trial in India will likely help SII bolster its application, similar to the approach it took with the Oxford-astrazeneca vaccine.
“With today’s results from our UK Phase 3 and South Africa Phase 2b clinical trials, we have now reported data on our Covid-19 vaccine from Phase 1, 2 and 3 trials involving over 20,000 participants… NVX-COV2373 is the first vaccine to demonstrate not only high clinical efficacy against Covid but also significant clinical efficacy against both the rapidly emerging UK and South Africa variants,” said Stanley C Erck, president and chief executive officer, Novavax, according to a company statement.
Experts said though the efficacy shown by J&j-janssen’s single dose vaccine is lower, it is still good news. “Look, a year ago, we are all hoping for efficacy in the 60-70% range. The MRNA and now Novavax data have spoiled us, as we now “expect” 90-95%… Lesser efficacy will still be useful, but there are going to be complications — what will the public want/expect/use? Will there be controversies there? And infected vaccine recipients may be a problem area for generating resistant variants,” said John Moore leading virologist and professor at Cornell University’s Weill Cornell Medicine in an e-mail.
A single-shot dose will be easier in terms of mass inoculations and help prevent severe disease and death. J&J is also testing a two-dose vaccine. “I think the two dose version will do better... It will be interesting to see whether they go to FDA for approval of one dose or want for the two dose data,” added Moore.