Clover Biopharmaceuticals of China reported on Wednesday that its potential Covid-19 -19  vaccine was found to be 67 per cent effective against any severity of the coronavirus and 79 per cent effective against the highly infectious Delta variant.

Currently the company already holds a deal for supplying 414 million doses its Covid-19 vaccine through the COVAX, a global vaccine sharing program.

The company stated that it would submit the data from the trial for conditional approval to both the World Health Organization (WHO) and regulators in China and Europe in the fourth quarter 2021.

In a large trial carried out by the company, it would incidents of 207 cases of possible Covid-19 symptoms at least two weeks following the second dose of the vaccine.

Clover representatives said that 52 of the total cases were from within vaccinated group while the rest 155 were given a placebo.

The company had also performed gene sequencing analysis on 146 of the infection cases. The three most common variants, Delta, Gamma, and Mu, accounted for 73 per cent of the total infections, it said. It included 56 Delta cases, 37 Mu and 13 Gamma samples.

Clover CEO Joshua Liang stated that SCB-2019 had demonstrated efficacy against the Delta strain, which is globally dominant variant of the coronavirus currently and is considered to the most infectious of all of the variants, as well as other variants of concern.

The company also claimed that its vaccine candidate was able to also provide protection against people developing moderate to severe diseases and 100 per cent protection against hospitalisations and severe Covid-19 related cases.

In the large scale trial, the vaccine was found to be 81.7 per cent effective against Delta variant causing moderate to severe forms of the disease in infected individuals. The vaccine candidate was also found to be 91.8 per cent effective against the Gamma variant of the coronavirus while it was 58.6 per cent effective against the Mu variant.

There were fewer participants over 65 years of age in the vaccine trials. Older people are more likely to die from severe form of the diseases and other causes compared to younger people. Clover said that older participants were not able to be enrolled because the countries Clover conducted the trial in had already begun to vaccinate the elderly.

Clover provided a slideshow that showed how 65-year-olds accounted for less than 1.5 per cent of the vaccinated and placebo group, and how all five Covid-19 patients for this age did not get the vaccine.

The vaccine candidate’s, which contains an adjuvant provided by Dynavax, efficacy were calculated on the basis of trials that included more than 30,000 participants in the Philippines, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa and Belgium.

(Adapted from Nasdaq.com)