Novavax’s COVID-19 Vaccine Demonstrates More Than 89 Percent Efficacy

Novavax has announced interim results from a phase 3 UK trial that showed its COVID-19 vaccine candidate, NVX-CoV2373, demonstrated 89.3 percent efficacy but faltered in a separate study that evaluated the vaccine for the South Africa variant.

The analysis of 62 COVID-19 infections in the 15,000-patient phase 3 study found that the vaccine showed high efficacy against both the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and the mutated variant first found in the UK, with more than 50 percent of the infections linked to the variant strain.

But the company also announced early results from a phase 2b study in South Africa, which mostly involved cases of the COVID-19 variant identified in that country. That data showed NVX-CoV2373 had only a 49 percent efficacy in the 4,400-patient trial.