Novavax’s vaccine candidate is nearly 90% effective against COVID-19, but just under 50% effective against the new South African variant of the virus, the company announced Thursday.
A UK study found that the Novavax vaccine was 89.3% effective in protecting participants from the COVID-19 symptom development test, the company said in a press release.
Good results came despite the new highly transmissible coronavirus variant now circulating in the UK.
“These are spectacular results and we are very pleased to have helped Novavax with the development of this vaccine,” said Stanley C. Erck, who runs the Maryland-based company.
“The effectiveness shown against emerging variants is also extremely encouraging.
But further preliminary results from a small separate study in South Africa, where a different mutation in the coronavirus is wreaking havoc, showed that Novavax was only effective with 49.4%, which is just over half of the test subjects received the puncture and then became ill.
Both Moderna and Pfizer vaccines in use have been more than 90 percent effective against COVID-19.
As of Thursday, New York has 22 cases of the new UK strain of coronavirus. The first two cases of the South African strain in the U.S. have just been found in South Carolina, officials announced Thursday.
Modern has said it is developing a vaccine booster to combat the strain first identified in South Africa.