An influential scientific panel will meet on Tuesday to discuss who should receive the newly licensed Covid-19 vaccine from Maryland’s pharmaceutical company Novavax.
Independent experts advising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine policy will be convened at 10 am in the east (you can see the meeting) here).they are Voting schedule Whether to approve a generic Novavax vaccine, which is expected to play a limited role in national immunization campaigns, at least initially. The Food and Drug Administration approved it as primary immunity for adults last week, but has not yet considered booster shots.
The Biden administration announced last week that it would buy 3.2 million doses of two-shot vaccine enough to fully vaccinate 1.6 million people in the United States. The vaccine is not yet available at pharmacies and other clinics that administer shots in the United States. In the purchase announcement, the government said Novavax is expected to finish quality testing soon. This is a necessary step before the dose is released.
If the CDC Committee, called the Immunization Implementation Advisory Board, votes to approve the use of the vaccine, the next step is for CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky to accept the recommendation, which is usually done quickly. I will.
This vaccine has been shown to be very protective against coronavirus infections and serious illnesses in clinical trials, but because it was done before the emergence of the Omicron variant, it was used to prevent infection. The effectiveness of other licensed vaccines has been significantly reduced.
At a meeting on Tuesday, CDC staff will review clinical trial data relating the vaccine to a high but low risk of developing a form of heart inflammation known as myocarditis or pericarditis. In a review of Novavax dataFDA scientists have identified six cases of this condition with approximately 40,000 trial volunteers.
The Novavax vaccine works differently than the three previously approved Covid vaccines in the United States. It provokes an immune response with nanoparticles composed of proteins from the surface of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19. Similar protein-based vaccines have been used worldwide for decades.
Novavax executives argue that this proven technology will make vaccines more acceptable to those concerned about the messenger RNA technology used by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which make up the majority of vaccinations in the United States. doing.
