The United States government has granted 1.6 billion U.S. dollars to Novavax, the funds will allow the American biotech company to conduct advanced human studies and established manufacturing to deliver a hundred million doses as soon as late 2020.
CEO of NOVAVAX, Stanley Erck said: “We have to make billions of doses globally for this vaccine so you start with making millions of doses and then hundreds of millions of doses and we have in this contract an obligation to make a hundred million doses that can we can start delivering for to the warehouse so they can be distributed by the fourth quarter of this year we’ll start delivering and we expect to have a whole 100 million doses done by so let’s say January or February next year.”
According to reports the US will be guaranteed priority for the first hundred million doses of the vaccine is proven efficient NOVAVAX is one of the frontrunners in the race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, the biggest contribution yet from the operation warp-speed program.
NOVAVAX is among the companies striving to develop an inoculation against the novel coronavirus that’s spreading quickly in countries including the United States India and Mexico. The biotech company had earlier secured as much as 338 million dollars in May 2020, from the Coalition for epidemic preparedness innovations the single largest contribution from the organization at the time.
President Donald Trump’s warp-speed program has backed efforts in a number of companies including Johnson & Johnson and many more to get a vaccine dose as early as possible.
Operation warp-speed seeks to compress a process that is typically years-long into a matter of months, the funds will help Novavax begin a final-stage study of its vaccine candidate as early as this fall with as many as 30,000 subjects NovaVax began clinical trials on 130 people in
Australia in May.
However, the results are not yet available it is expected to launch the so-called phase 3 trial.