A panel of the US FDA has recommended that biotechnologist Novavax’s corona vaccine be approved for adults. If the FDA follows the panel’s recommendation, which it usually does within days, Novavax will become the fourth US-approved corona vaccine, alongside those from Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson (Janssen).
Provided the Covid-19 vaccine is approved, Novavax hopes to ship “millions of doses” of it to its US warehouses by the end of June, board member John Trizzino said. The company produces the vaccines with its Indian partner, the biotechnologist Serum Institute of India.
Novavax’s two-shot vaccine is a so-called protein vaccine: a more traditional type of vaccine that uses technology that has been used for decades to fight diseases such as the flu. That should especially reassure the approximately 27 million American adults who have yet to be vaccinated. They would not dare to try the successful and popular vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna because they work with a piece of genetic code.
That assumption turned out not to be true in the EU, where the Novavax vaccine is already approved and available. The alternative to the most common corona vaccines is hardly in demand. Of the approximately 12.6 million doses of Novavax vaccine distributed in the EU since the end of December, only approximately 220,000 doses of the double vaccination have been administered.
Also in the Netherlands there is hardly any enthusiasm for the protein vaccine. Our country bought 840,000 doses of the vaccine for approximately 15 million euros. By mid-April, less than a thousand shots had been taken.