Novavax reported that its COVID-19 vaccine was 96% effective against the original strain of the virus.

Pharmaceutical company Novavax reported on Thursday that its COVID-19 vaccine showed 96% efficacy against the virus’s parent strain in a large-scale study conducted in the UK.

The inoculant also It was 86% effective against the UK variant and 55% in a smaller trial conducted in South Africa., whose participants were exposed primarily to the most contagious strain circulating in the country. However, in these cases the effectiveness in preventing severe cases and deaths was 100 percent.

Agree with The New York Times, the South African trial was relatively small, with only 4,400 volunteers, and it was not designed to provide an accurate estimate of the protection offered by the vaccine.

The efficacy data are similar to those of the vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

As reported by Reuters, the pharmaceutical company will use this information to seek approval in different countries. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) is already studying its effectiveness.

At the beginning of March, the company He said he hoped to apply for his vaccine to be licensed early in the second trimester in the UK and soon after in the US..

Novavax, however, said it had no guarantee that US authorities would agree to reconsider its claim, which, for the time being, will only be based on the results of Phase 3 trials conducted in the UK while similar trials continue United States. UK government has already agreed to buy 60 million Novavax vaccines

Novavax said it had opened a dialogue with the US drug agency (FDA) “with a possible application for an urgent use permit in the second quarter,” he added.

If the FDA refuses to study the British data, the procedure will begin after learning of the results of trials in the United States and Mexico involving 30,000 people.

The results are in line with the information published at the end of January.

At the time, company president and CEO Stanley Erck said the vaccine “has the potential to play an important role in addressing this global public health crisis.” “We have the first test, we are the first to perform an efficacy test against an evolving virus,” Erck said. The company announced in January that it would begin testing a new inoculant designed to provide better protection against the South African variant.

Novavax’s vaccine does not use messenger RNA technology, as in the case of Pfizer and Moderna, but instead uses the injection of coronavirus proteins to generate an immune response, a more traditional technique.

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