Novavax COVID-19 vaccine candidate 96.4% effective in Phase 3 trial in UK

Yahoo Finance's Anjalee Khemlani breaks down the latest vaccine efficacy data for Novavax following trials in UK and South Africa

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: So there's breaking news with Novavax. What have you got, Anjalee?

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: That's correct, Adam. We just learned that Novavax has released their final efficacy results of their COVID-19 vaccine in studies in the UK and South Africa, and that's showing really high efficacy rates. We got 96.4% in the UK with the original strain of COVID-19, as well as 86% against the UK strain, that's the B117 that we know is of concern here in the US. And it's highly transmissible, as well as an aggregate of 89% of the UK.

Moving to South Africa now, that is 55% in non HIV participants. So that is showing some pretty strong results, and kind of on par with what we've seen. Novavax is supposed to be one of those that is of higher efficacy compared to others. But we can't do, necessarily, an apples to apples comparison to, say, Pfizer and Moderna that saw similar results here in the US.

But we did see lower results, you know, from Johnson & Johnson when you looked at the global sort of effect. And so this is important because we know that Novavax is trying to use some of the world data to get approval here in the US.

ADAM SHAPIRO: And we should point out that shares of Novavax closed up almost 9%. And right now, after hours, they're trading up about 7% on this news. Anjalee, thank you.