Dispatches from a Pandemic
I’ve already been injected with a COVID vaccine. This is why I’m cheering for the Novavax underdog.
Published: Nov. 27, 2020 at 4:00 p.m. ET
By Pierre Briançon
‘No, I never considered it was risky, and no, of course, I’m not getting paid. I just received my second shot a few days ago,’ writes Pierre Briançon of volunteering for a vaccine trial in London..
Novavax is headquartered in Rockville, Md.
The first question that came to my friends’ minds was whether I’d really thought about the possible dangers. Two of them, more focused on worldly matters, asked whether at least I was being paid.
That was a month ago, a few days before I went to London’s Royal Free Hospital to have my first shot as a volunteer in the Phase 3 trial of a coronavirus vaccine. Now the same friends seem to wonder whether I have chosen the right horse, but they don’t venture to ask me for fear of hurting my feelings.
The vaccine I’m trying is developed by Novavax NVAX, +22.50%, a U.S. biotech company, and it was the second one to be tested in a late-stage trial in the U.K., after the one produced by the collaboration of Oxford University and AstraZeneca AZN, +0.28%. A third one, by Johnson & Johnson JNJ, +0.22%, will soon start late-stage trials in the U.K., as well.
But all the news in recent weeks has been on the three vaccines that had reached 90% efficacy or higher in their late-stage trial. No news from Novavax — which is natural because its wide-scale trial started later than the others — so the candidate I have come to consider “my” vaccine, looks like it’s running fourth at best …
In reality this is all silly. I just received my second shot a few days ago. The answers to all of my friends’ questions are negative. No, I never considered it was risky. No, of course I’m not getting paid. And, as all the experts would tell you, it does make very much sense for Novavax and the dozens of other vaccine candidates to continue with the trials — even if three other vaccines have already shown results, something that was not expected to happen so fast when the world was confronted earlier this year with the calamity of the first coronavirus wave.
It’s not that I want to cheer my team against all odds, as supporters stick with their football club for better and for worse. But ever since I got a phone call asking me to confirm the decision I’d made in early summer to join the register of vaccine volunteers for the NHS, Britain’s health service, I have of course become interested not only in the vaccine but in the fate of the U.S. biotech that is developing it.
So I know that Novavax is based in Maryland, and that the smart move — silly me —- would have been to buy its shares in January instead of receiving its vaccine in October. The stock is up 2,200% since the beginning of the year (no, I didn’t throw an extra 0 on that. Put differently, the share price has been multiplied by 23). No underdog there at least. And that’s for a company that is yet to put an actual vaccine on the market.
Pierre Briançon.
The overall reason for the lack of anxiety or “fear of danger,” as my friends would put it, about being inoculated with an unknown substance is that you’re being accompanied most of the way by the NHS doctors and nurses who manage the trial. Everything is explained, options are offered (you can leave whenever you feel like it, without having to give a reason), test kits are distributed in case symptoms occur, and an app is there to keep a daily diary if they do.
Then there’s a monthly “vaccine registry” newsletter, the latest of which insisted that it does make sense to keep researching and trying: Divya Chadha Manek, the head of clinical trials of the U.K. vaccine task force, explained to me (and a few thousand others) first that we will need many vaccines both globally and in the U.K. Second, and this may be even more important, not all vaccines will be found appropriate for all people. “Basically, we can’t put all our eggs in one basket,” Divya wrote.
Besides, this is still, very literally, a trial-and-error process. Three vaccines that seem to have proven their efficacy — from Pfizer PFE, +1.91%, the U.S. pharma group, in collaboration with Germany’s with BioNTech BNTX, +4.79% 22UA, +3.35% ; biotech Moderna MRNA, +16.34% ; and the AstraZeneca–Oxford University collaborative effort. But questions started being raised about both the process and implementation of AstraZeneca’s Phase 3 trial just a few days after it published its preliminary results. This could mean at the very least that the road to an effective vaccine may be longer and bumpier than hoped for in the optimism of the last two weeks.
So I still root for Novavax, which will take another few months to tell us about the trial result, and just extended its pool of volunteers in the U.K. from 10,000 to 15,000 — even though I may not even be vaccinated at all: Half of us were injected with a placebo, an inactive saline solution looking like a vaccine dose that will have no effect on our immune system. This is a “double blind” trial where even the doctors and nurses following us do not know whether we got the vaccine.
So I’m left wondering, trying not to become a hypochondriac who takes the smallest signs of unease for possible symptoms. Is my left arm hurting after the second shot? Is that a serious headache? And why did I just cough?
Pierre Briançon
Pierre Briançon is a senior writer at Barron's Group. He has written for Politico, Reuters Breakingviews, Le Monde and Libération. Follow him on Twitter: @pierrebri.
Best
Ken Miller
26 Nov
I agree with Henry Ng. It would have been useful to explain how the Novovax vaccine would work. Here's the deal: These researchers used cultured cells to produce the spike protein on the surface of the virus. They then harvested those proteins, and embedded them into the surfaces of synthetic lipid-like particles. The spike protein coated particles, along with an immune system booster, are then injected into the bloodstream. Unlike the three front-runners, this vaccine does not include either DNA or RNA for the spike protein, but rather contains the protein itself to provoke the immune response.
Reply
7
Ranjit Thomas
2d ago
The current drug approval process of months of trials followed by weeks of analysis is not built for a pandemic. Once safety (and to some extent efficacy) is established, it's best to roll out the vaccine to millions of volunteers as an "extended trial". Then you can publish the data regularly to have people decide whether they want to take it or not. This process could have started in July, saving thousands of lives. Instead, all that the healthcare policy people say is "shutdown, shutdown"!
Reply
1
Thomas Palley
26 Nov
Maybe the most important reason for wanting many vaccines is to stop Pharma price gouging.
One vaccine = monopoly. A few vaccines = oligopoly. In both cases = high prices, huge profits, massive cost of vaccination that impoverishes the public sector, & incomplete vaccination of the population.
Competition is the antidote. The trouble in Pharma is "excessive" patent protection which has become a menace to public health & a financial burden for working people.
Reply
1
3
Mike Staples
Thomas Palley
26 Nov
If there are several vaccines, there will external restraint on pricing through competition. If there is only one, there will be internal pricing restraint not to appear greedy. Should a single source company attempt to impose monopoly pricing, they will soon find themselves “negotiating” with the government.
Reply
1
Jeff Miller
Thomas Palley
26 Nov
Fascinating that you complain about "Pharma price gouging" yet the tech companies have far higher profit margins and greater profits. But you don't complain about tech price gouging.
Is there a political motive behind your complaints?
= new reply since forum marked as read
