The Centre on 15 June said clinical trials of the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine in India are in an advanced stage of completion and hoped the US-based company will soon start trials of its protein-based vaccine on children too.

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"Novavax results are promising. What we are learning from data available in the public domain that this vaccine is very safe and highly effective. It will be produced in India. Clinical trials are being conducted and are in an advanced stage of completion", Dr VK Paul, Member-Health, Niti Aayog said in a press briefing by the Union Health Ministry. He said that Novavax vaccine will be produced in India, hopefully in very large quantities. Preparatory work has already been done by the Pune-based manufacturer Serum Institute of India, which has an agreement with the Maryland-based company to produce 1.1 billion doses of the vaccine in India.

Dr Paul said there will be some gap in the production of the (Novavax vaccine) for a while adding, "I am also hoping they (Novavax) would also start trials on children too". US-based Novavax, on 14 June, announced that its recombinant nanoparticle protein-based COVID-19 vaccine demonstrated 100 per cent protection against moderate and severe disease from SARS-CoV-2 and 90.4 per cent overall efficacy in its "PREVENT-19 Phase III trials". The study involved 29,960 participants across 119 sites across the US and Mexico.

In May this year, the company had said that it has initiated a pediatric expansion of its Phase 3 clinical trial for its COVID vaccine candidate The additional arm of the ongoing PREVENT-19 pivotal trial will evaluate the efficacy, safety and immunogenicity of NVX-CoV2373 in up to 3,000 adolescents aged 12-17 across up to 75 sites in the US. Meanwhile, Dr Paul pointed out that the COVID virus transmission is very low right now but people still need to be cautious.

"Virus transmission is very low right now. We are dealing with a highly transmissible variant this year. Hence, we need to maintain greater caution and strictly abide by COVID19 appropriate behaviour", he added. Meanwhile, India reported 60,471 new COVID-19 cases, the lowest count after 75 days, while the daily positivity rate further dropped to 3.45 per cent, according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on 15 June. The daily positivity rate is below 5 per cent for 8 consecutive days. The active cases further declined to 9,13,378, taking the weekly positivity rate at 4.39 per cent, while the national COVID-19 recovery rate has improved to 95.64 per cent. With the fresh cases, the country's tally of cases has climbed to 2,95,70,881, as per Union Health Ministry.