Clover says its COVID-19 vaccine candidate 67 per cent effective in large trial

A potential COVID-19 vaccine from China’s Clover Biopharmaceuticals was 67 per cent effective against COVID-19 and 79 per cent against the highly infectious Delta variant in a large, late-stage trial, the company said yesterday.

The company has a deal to supply up to 414 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine through the global vaccine sharing scheme COVAX.

It said it would submit the trial data for conditional approval to the World Health Organization (WHO) and regulators in China and Europe in the fourth quarter of 2021.

A total of 207 symptomatic COVID-19 cases were reported at least two weeks after the second dose in a large trial.

Of the total cases, 52 were from a vaccinated group and the remaining 155 were from a placebo group, a Clover representative said.

It conducted gene sequencing analysis on 146 cases and the three most prevalent variants were Delta, Gamma and Mu, accounting for 73 per cent of them. The analysis included 56 Delta cases and 37 Mu cases.

“We are pleased that SCB-2019 has successfully demonstrated efficacy against the globally dominant Delta strain and other concerning variants,” Joshua Liang, CEO, Clover, said in a statement.

“Based on our pioneering data, we believe that SCB-2019 could be utilised as an important tool to combat this pandemic.”

The vaccine showed an 83.7 per cent efficacy against moderate-to-severe disease, and 100 per cent against hospitalisation and severe cases caused by COVID-19.

The efficacy rates of the candidate, which contains an adjuvant provided by Dynavax, are based on trials involving more than 30,000 participants in the Philippines, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa and Belgium.