A Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisory committee will meet Tuesday to decide whether Americans could soon have a fourth COVID-19 vaccine choice.
The committee will be considering a vaccine made by Novavax, a company that began work on a COVID-19 vaccine in 2020 but struggled to produce large amounts of the drug.
The federal advisory committee will be looking at the company’s data from clinical trials as it considers the two-dose vaccine.
The FDA will then have to look at Novavax’s manufacturing process, which according to a story in The New York Times, the company has had issues with.
The drug has shown great promise, according to clinical data. Last fall, the company announced that its vaccine showed robust protection in a large British trial.
The Novavax vaccine is not an mRNA shot like the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are. Instead, it is a protein-based vaccine such as the ones use to fight pneumonia, pertussis, hepatitis B and other illnesses.
If approved for use, the shot would be available to those over age 18.