On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration approved the revised Covid injection from Novavax for emergency use.
The modified vaccine, which targets the JN.1 strain of the virus, is approved for use in people 12 years of age and older.
Late afternoon trading saw a 9% increase in the company’s shares.
“Today’s authorization offers an extra option for the Covid-19 vaccine,” FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research director Peter Marks stated.
According to the company’s email answer, doses should be ready as early as the end of the next week.
The KP.2 variant-targeting Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines were modified and authorized by the health authorities earlier this month.
Earlier this year, JN.1 was the most common strain in the US. Although it is no longer as common, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that it may have contributed 0.2% of cases over a two-week period ending on August 31.
In contrast, the KP.2 variety is thought to make up 3.1%, with KP.3.1.1 presently dominating at 42.2%.
The health regulator revised its advice in June for the strains of Covid-19 and 25. It requested that makers modify the vaccines to target the KP.2 variety, if possible, rather than the JN.1 lineage, as it had previously done.
Compared to vaccines based on messenger RNA, such as Moderna’s Spikevax and Pfizer and BioNTech’s Comirnaty, Novavax’s conventional protein-based injection provides an alternative.
Over the last three months, the number of hospitalizations and deaths in the US due to COVID-19 has grown. The need for the vaccinations, however, has significantly decreased since the pandemic’s height.
Although Novavax expects its own performance to improve, it expects the general demand for Covid vaccinations in the United States to remain comparable to last year, as it stated earlier this month.
