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Canada’s federal government has signed an agreement in principle to acquire up to 76 million doses of a potential COVID-19 vaccine being developed by an American company.
Maryland-based biotechnology company Novavax announced in a press release Monday that it has struck a deal to produce a vaccine it is working on for the Canadian government, should the vaccine ever get Health Canada approval.
The company’s vaccine is one of dozens in development around the world, each of which targets the virus that causes COVID-19 in a different way.
At last count, the virus has killed more than 846,000 people around the world since the start of this year.
Novavax’s vaccine is known as a “protein subunit” vaccine, which has the advantage of being manufactured faster than some other types of vaccine but generally doesn’t produce as strong an immune response as some other potential options.
The company released promising results of a very small clinical trial earlier this month, which showed it produced higher levels of the antibodies in healthy volunteers after two doses than those found in recovered COVID-19 patients.
The initial trial tested 106 subjects aged 18 to 59 with the vaccine, along with 25 people who received a placebo. The next phase of testing currently underway in the U.S. and Australia will include many more people, and at least half of them will be between the ages of 60 and 84, an age bracket of people who face the highest risk of having the worst outcomes from being infected, based on what we know about the virus.
Potential rollout in spring
The company plans to start much larger late-stage clinical trials soon, and told Reuters last month that if all goes well, they expect they could obtain regulatory approvals as early as December. The company said Monday the vaccine, should it work and be safe, would be available to Canadians as early as the second quarter of 2021.
“We are pleased to work with the Canadian government on supply of our COVID-19 vaccine, an essential step to ensure broad access of our vaccine candidate,” said CEO Stanley C. Erck in a release.
“We are pleased to announce this agreement with Novavax, which will give Canadians access to a promising COVID-19 vaccine candidate,” Canada’s minister of public services and procurement, Anita Anand, said in a news release
“This is an important step in our government’s efforts to secure a vaccine to keep Canadians safe and healthy, as the global pandemic evolves.”
Novavax has signed similar deals with the United Kingdom, India, the Czech Republic, South Africa and Japan to supply doses of the potential vaccine.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The deal with Novavax is one of many similar ones that the federal government has signed with drug companies, including Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.
“Taken together, our vaccine agreements will give Canada at least 88 million doses, with options to obtain tens of millions more,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at a press conference on Monday morning, at which he announced $126 million to expand a bio-manufacturing facility in Montreal, to produce drugs and vaccines to combat COVID-19 and other things.
“In the weeks and months ahead, our government will continue to take the steps needed to make sure Canada gets a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as possible,” Trudeau said.
“Once a vaccine is proven to work, we’ll also need to be able to produce and distribute it here at home.”
Novavax’s vaccine is one of roughly a dozen that has been singled out by the U.S. government for funding under the so-called Operation Warp Speed plan to speed up treatments for the coronavirus that has swept the world into economic chaos this year.
