Daily US Times: A new Cpvid-19 vaccine has been shown to be 89.3% effective in large-scale UK trials. The Novavax vaccine is the first to show it is effective against the new variant of the coronavirus discovered in the UK.

The UK Prime Minister welcomed the “good news” and said the UK’s medicines regulator would now assess the vaccine.

The UK has secured 60 million doses of the vaccine, which will be made in Stockton-on-Tees.

British government said, if approved for use by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the doses are expected to be delivered in the second half of this year.

The UK has so far approved three Covid vaccines for emergency use – one Pfizer and BioNTech, another by Oxford University and AstraZeneca and a third from drug firm Moderna.

The Novavax jab was shown to be 89.3% effective at preventing Covid-19 in participants in its Phase 3 clinical trial in the United Kingdom, which enrolled more than 15,000 people aged between 18-84, of whom 27% were older than 65, Novavax said.

In the South African part of the trial, where most of the cases were the South African variant of the coronavirus, the vaccine was 60% effective among those without HIV.

The chief executive of Novavax, Stan Erck, said the results from the UK trial were “spectacular” and “as good as we could have hoped”, while the efficacy in South Africa was “above people’s expectations”.

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