Vaccine advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration decided Tuesday that authorizing Novavax’s Covid-19 vaccine — which uses different technology from the three vaccines currently in use in the US — for emergency use in adults would be beneficial.
Most of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee voted “yes” in response to a question of whether the benefits of Novavax’s vaccine, given as a two-dose primary series, outweigh its risks in people 18 and older, based on available evidence. Twenty-one members voted yes, one abstained, and none voted no.
If the full FDA gives the vaccine the green light, it will become the fourth Covid-19 vaccine authorized in the United States. Novavax’s vaccine is made using small laboratory-built pieces of the coronavirus to stimulate immunity. This protein-based approach is a more traditional one for vaccine development than the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna.