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After so much publicity, it turns out that the long-awaited COVID hit from vaccine manufacturer Novavax hit the market too late.
In its second-quarter effects on Monday, Novavax reported sales of just $186 million for the quarter, well below analysts’ expectations of $1. 02 billion, according to FactSet. The Maryland-based company also halved its profit forecast and now expects sales by 2022. be between $2 billion and $2. 3 billion, from the $4 billion to $5 billion it forecast earlier this year. The company lost $510 million this quarter, compared to a loss of $352 million at the same time a year ago. Shares of the vaccine manufacturer collapsed by more than 30% in after-hours exchanges.
Novavax CEO Stanley Erck blamed the company’s poor sales on an existing glut of vaccine doses, which has led governments to delay or suspend orders. Even COVAX, the foreign initiative to bring COVID vaccines to emerging countries, has more vaccines than are currently needed. . Erck told the Wall Street Journal that COVAX had given up an order for 350 million doses of Novavax due to oversupply from manufacturers.
This surplus is a shame for Novavax, which has taken much longer to market its vaccine than its competitors Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson.
In July 2020, Novavax earned $1600 million from the U. S. government. As part of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s initiative to fund covid vaccine progress. In return, Novavax promised to produce one hundred million doses of a COVID vaccine. Novavax had not yet put a product on the market, unlike other Warp Speed recipients like Johnson.
Novavax eventually developed a two-dose COVID vaccine and got approval from the Food and Drug Administration, but did so months after its rivals due to production delays and regulatory issues. Indonesia was the first government to approve the Novavax vaccine on November 1, 2021, followed by India, the European Union, Japan and Australia. The U. S. FDA, however, approved the Novavax vaccine on July 19.
Despite its long road to market, Novavax expressed hope that there will still be demand for its vaccine. The company felt its prick could act as a viable recall, strengthening coverage against new Omicron variants. (The FDA has still approved the Novavax vaccine as a booster; only unvaccinated Americans can receive the Novavax vaccine as of now. )
Public fitness experts have warned that the more classic generation of Novavax would possibly convince some vaccine skeptics, wary of the mRNA generation used in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, to get vaccinated nonetheless. vaccinated
None of the predictions came true for Novavax. ” I think we were lagging behind in the market, and vaccination in the U. S. UU. se based on what was there and worked: mRNA vaccines,” Erck said.
According to government data, 7300 injections of Novavax have been administered in the United States so far. (More than 357 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech have been administered in the United States)
Novavax is the only manufacturer affected by the oversupply of vaccines. Moderna said earlier this month that declining demand for COVAX led to a decline in its profits in the current quarter. In April, Johnson
The oversupply of vaccines is a radical replacement for the situation a year ago, when public health officials complained about vaccine dose shortages and criticized rich countries for stockpiling vaccines for booster campaigns rather than sharing excess doses with poorer countries.
COVAX says it has enough doses to vaccinate 70 percent of the world’s population — the purpose set through the World Health Organization — and that the challenge now is distribution rather than supply.
As of August 9, 64% of the world’s population had received at least two doses of a vaccine. The majority of the world’s unvaccinated population lives in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
This tale originally appeared in Fortune. com