Thread by @hildabast

Interim readout from Novavax phase 3 from the 15k UK & 4.4k phase 2b from South Africa. High efficacy in the UK: 89.3% (95% CI: 75.2 – 95.4) - lowered a bit by the new variant...1/n ir.novavax.com/news-releases/…

...SA results heavily affected by new variant. Overall efficacy was 60% efficacy (95% CI: 19.9 – 80.1) for the bulk of people who were HIV- : very wide confidence intervals, because it's a small trial. With small HIV+ group included, (efficacy of 49.4%; 95% CI: 6.1 – 72.8) ...2/n

...Critically, the primary efficacy result, as for the other vaccines, is for people who hadn't had a previous SARS-CoV-2 infection. But 1/3 did. No data released for them, but previous infection may not protect against the new "SA" variant ...3/n

...Bottom line: it does protect against the SA variant, but not as well as against the original & "UK" variants. Novavax is working on vaccine targeting the new strain.

Press release doesn't discuss safety & adverse events (AEs): AEs were very low in early phase results ...4/n

...It's protein subunit vaccine; requires same distribution & use as common vaccines (hep B & some other common ones also this category).

They also announced they have recruited 16k of the 30k needed for their US trial.... 5/6

...Giant sigh of relief: another high efficacy vaccine! And because of the capacity to produce it in India at very large scale - it's one of the handful that could be a billion doses - this is huge. (Though massive quantity hasn't already been produced.) 6/6

...PS! Back to the UK trial. 27% were over 65, so around 4,000 people. Only 1 severe illness in each of the trials - both were people in the placebo groups.

...PPS: Protocols for the Novavax trials: novavax.com/resources My collection of records for this vaccine: zotero.org/groups/2528572…

(And I'm revising my January roundup to accommodate this today.)