Novavax for Covid 19

A third vaccine option is soon to be rolled out in this country and unlike The Astra/Zeneca or Pfizer vaccine visualised above Novavax is more traditional in nature incorporating the spike protein assembled as nanoparticles assisted by an adjuvant saponin extracted from the bark of the Chilean soapbark tree to boost the immune response to this vaccine.

Two important questions we want to ask is firstly how effective is this vaccine against the delta strain and more worrisome new mutations and secondly what is its side effect profile?  Unfortunately, this vaccine was conceived before the delta strain emerged and while the manufacturers are telling us that they have just engineered a booster shot which has a six-fold increase in cross-reactive functional antibodies compared to primary vaccines, this immune enhancing capacity is not found in the initial vaccine which we will be given to us.  As far as side effects go these are listed as mild and innocuous which is encouraging however scrutiny of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting system sponsored by the Centre for Disease Control in the USA, which records all reported adverse events generated by any vaccine, does not show any data recorded for Novavax which is curious.

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