- Vaccines will be manufactured, finished and filled in Barnard Castle rather than GSK’s vaccines hub in Belgium
- The Novavax jab has proven to be effective against the Kent variant of the disease
- Novavax - an American company - is now seeking approval for its vaccine
It is perhaps overly sentimental to suggest that the UK is returning to normality this week thanks in part to AstraZeneca (AZN). But it is true that pace and volume of vaccine manufacture by a British company has permitted the mass vaccination of this nation’s elderly and vulnerable which means that we can now return to schools and parks and public swimming pools and golf courses, safe in the knowledge that those most at risk of severe infection from Covid-19 have been protected.
Looking at Astra’s share price (down 13 per cent in the last six months in a recklessly positive market) you wouldn’t think the company has played such a crucial role in getting one of the world’s major economies back on its feet. The international headlines swirling around the company are also not especially flattering - German researchers have said the vaccine may trigger a rare immune response, Canadian officials have just suspended the use of it for under 55s, trade tensions are turning nasty.
Why then has GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) just put itself in a similar position by agreeing to manufacture 60m doses of Novavax’s Covid-19 vaccine exclusively for distribution by the UK government in a non-profit tie-up?
Roger Conner, president of vaccines at GSK said that any pharma company would do the same in the current environment. Big pharma companies have the capacity and funding to manufacture vaccines on a grand scale, small companies have the ability to innovate at pace. It’s a model that he hopes will be replicated in the years ahead. As for the notion that the company is contributing to vaccine nationalism by only manufacturing for the UK, Mr Conner thinks that the scale of the pandemic requires a global effort far beyond the capabilities of any one company. His business is simply doing what it can.
But it is hard to deny that GSK and the government’s decision to manufacture all 60m doses of the Novavax jab in the UK, rather than at the ‘heart of GSK’s vaccine operations’ in Belgium, is likely to have been taken with trade tensions in mind.
We have said before that we think GSK might have played a better vaccine game than Astra and this deal also shows that the pharma giant has learnt from its peer’s mistakes. By manufacturing entirely in the UK, the company won’t have to deal with the EU at all for distributing this batch of vaccines. This is also a potential boon when the government comes to picking its long-term vaccine supplier.
Novavax’s jab has the added bonus of being effective against the newer Kent variation of the virus - something the Astra/Oxford vaccine has not yet been able to prove in clinical trials. GSK will add its own vaccine expertise to the Novavax innovation to potentially make the jab work against multiple strains.
Very few pharma companies have managed to create profitable vaccines businesses and GSK is a rare exception. In signing a sensible deal with Novavax and the government, the company has once again proved that experience pays.
