US vaccine Novavax: high vaccine effect - but not so much in mutants

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A corona vaccine candidate from the US pharmaceutical company Novavax apparently protects 89 percent from Covid-19.

This emerges from a preliminary analysis of the third and final test phase for the preparation, as the company announced on Thursday.

According to the British study, the agent also works against variants of the virus that have appeared for the first time in Great Britain and South Africa - albeit not quite as well.

The test run with 15,000 subjects in the UK is still ongoing.

However, the preliminary analysis showed that 62 participants had been diagnosed with Covid-19 so far - and only six in the group that received the vaccine.

The rest received an ineffective placebo.

These subjects were infected in a phase in which the United Kingdom recorded a massive increase in corona cases, which is attributed to the particularly contagious mutant.

More than half of the study participants had the variant, as a preliminary study showed.

The numbers are very small, but according to Novavax, they suggest that the experimental vaccine is almost 96 percent effective against the predominant coronavirus and almost 86 percent against the mutant.

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Both values ​​are "dramatic demonstrations" of the vaccine's ability to develop a "very effective" immune response, Novavax boss Stanley Erck said on Thursday evening (local time) in a phone call with investors.

Researchers are even more concerned about the virus variant discovered in South Africa, which has various mutations.

First results of a Novavax study on a smaller scale suggest that the vaccine works against this variant, but not nearly as well as against those from Great Britain.

Some subjects with HIV took part in the South African study.

In HIV-negative volunteers, the vaccine appeared to be 60 percent effective.

If you included the immunocompromised participants, the general protection rate was 49 percent, as Novovax announced.

Genetic tests are still ongoing, but around 90 percent of the Covid 19 diseases identified in the South African study seem to be due to the new mutant.

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“These are good results.

There is reason to be optimistic, "said Glenda Gray, head of the South African Medical Research Council, referring to the protection rate of 60 percent.

Even with the new variant, "vaccine effectiveness" can still be determined.

More worrying, however, is what the study says about a completely different question: the likelihood that people could contract Covid-19 a second time, said the head of the South African test run, Shabir Madhi, from Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg.

There are indications that almost a third of the test subjects had already been infected - and at the same time the rate of new infections in the placebo group was similarly high.

Previous infections with early variants of the virus in South Africa did not protect against infection with the new, Madhi said.

Novavax said more data would be needed before the vaccine could be approved in the UK.

But it could already be in February.

A much more extensive study is currently underway in the United States and Mexico, for which a little more than half of the 30,000 volunteers required have been signed.

Scientists and those responsible in politics are concerned with the question of whether approved and upcoming vaccines can ward off the worrisome mutants.

The world is also hoping for new vaccines in the face of bottlenecks in ordered cans.