Three things to know about Novavax, the new vaccine that could arrive in France in February

“It’s a welcome addition to the arsenal to protect Europeans”, welcomed the President of the European Commission Ursula Von der Leyen in December, announcing the authorization of the anti-Covid vaccine from Novavax in the EU, with an early contract with the American laboratory for 200 million doses. The Nuvaxovid vaccine could be offered in France from the beginning of February, the Ministry of Health announced on Thursday. Based on a technology more traditional than messenger RNA vaccines, it could reduce the skepticism of some of the unvaccinated.

Neither viral vector vaccine (such as AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson), nor messenger RNA (such as Pfizer or Moderna), Nuvaxovid uses yet another technology: it is a “subunit” vaccine, also known as “with recombinant proteins”. The principle is to inject into the body a protein which resembles the now famous “Spike protein” of the virus, to trigger the production of antibodies against the true S protein of the Coronavirus.

The method is already known, and used for example in vaccines against pertussis or hepatitis-B. This is the same technology used by the vaccine that the French laboratory Sanofi is developing, and which could arrive on the market in the first quarter of 2022, after two postponements.

Certain advantage of Novavax’s subunit vaccine: it can be stored between 2 ° and 8 ° Celsius, which will facilitate its transport and distribution. Messenger RNA vaccines require extremely low temperatures, which require freezers that are not available, on a large scale anyway, in most low-income countries – although Pfizer recently relaxed the storage conditions for its vaccine. By arriving late on the market, the doses of Novavax are all the more likely to be in excess in developed countries, and could then be redistributed via the Covax system.

Last June, the Novavax laboratories published the first conclusions of their phase 3 clinical trials, carried out on 30,000 people. On this basis, the company ensured that its vaccine protected “100% against moderate and severe forms” of the disease, and 90.4% overall “. But even more, Novavax announced an efficacy of 93% against the “predominant variants”, even if at the date of this study, neither the Delta variant, nor the Omicron, were not yet included.

The World Health Organization urgently approved, in December, this vaccine from the company Novavax, indicating that it was the tenth thus validated. WHO recommends the vaccine for anyone over the age of 18, with an interval of at least three weeks between two doses.