Vaccines
In general, I try not to post about things that people SAY are going to happen, preferring to wait until it actually happens. However, I am and have been quite excited about Novavax for a long time, so I am really pleased to hear that they are finally going to announce the results of their big clinical trial.
The Novavax vaccine had results rivaling the mRNA vaxes against COVID Classic and Alpha (“UK”) (although not so great against Beta (“South Africa”)), and it’s a neat technology. Instead of a payload of mRNA which tells the body to make spike proteins, it has a payload of spike proteins assembled into a little ball (sort of like the pan-influenza virus I talked about on Tuesday).
Variants
A very detailed Technical Briefing from Public Health England says that not only is the Delta strain significantly more contagious, it’s also more severe. It cites a study in England which puts the risk of hospitalization at 2.61 times that of Alpha, and a study in Scotland which says it’s 2.39. Ow.
This Letter says that Pfizer is much less effective against the Delta strain than the Alpha strain, and is more like Gamma in that regard. This was in a test population that was young(ish) and healthy; they found that the antibody response was inversely correlated with age. Ulp.