The Novavax COVID-19 vaccine utilizes a different technology than the current mRNA vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna or the viral vector J&J vaccine. It is a protein-based vaccine which has some advantages, as do each of the other vaccine technologies. Here's an article from nature describing how it works and some advantages.
You can click the link below for a graphic illustrating how protein-based vaccines work.
https://www.nature.com/articles/How protein-based COVID vaccines could change the pandemicHow protein-based COVID vaccines could change the pandemicExcerpts below:
So far, fewer than 6% of people in low-income countries have been vaccinated against COVID-19. Protein-based vaccines — with their inexpensive production protocols and logistical advantages, including stability at a broad range of temperatures — could help to narrow the immunization gap between rich and poor countries.
“The world needs these protein-based vaccines to reach those vulnerable populations,” says Nick Jackson, head of programmes and innovative technologies at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which has invested more than US$1 billion in five protein-based COVID-19 vaccines in active development. The lion’s share is going to products made by Clover, Novavax and SK bioscience in Seongnam, South Korea. “Protein vaccines are going to beckon in a new era of COVID-19 immunization,” Jackson says.
From the earliest days of the pandemic response, researchers anticipated that protein-based designs would be slower off the blocks than other vaccine technologies.
Companies know how to manufacture gobs of purified protein at scale — using genetically engineered cells from mammals, insects or microbes — but the process involves many steps, each of which has to be optimized for making a specific protein. “There’s an intrinsic slowness,” says Christian Mandl, a former industry executive who now consults on vaccine-development issues. Most of the protein-based vaccines currently in testing have been crafted around some version of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein, which helps the virus to enter cells (see ‘Protein vaccines 101’).
Once authorized, protein shots are also expected to rapidly address supply shortages that have plagued efforts to vaccinate lower-income countries. Novavax and Clover, for example, have each pledged to donate hundreds of millions of doses of their jabs next year to COVAX, an initiative designed to distribute vaccines around the world.
The global health community has also been arguing that equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines could be achieved through local manufacturing of shots in the global south. To achieve this, more researchers should be looking to simple, inexpensive production systems that manufacturers in less-wealthy countries can readily implement, says Christopher Love, a chemical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
In the earliest days of the COVID-19 crisis, vaccine platforms such as mRNA brought the advantage of speed, says Ralf Clemens, a vaccine-industry veteran and a scientific adviser to Clover. But now that a wave of protein-based vaccines is coming, he says, they will have a lot more to offer — and in the long run when it comes to protecting the world against coronavirus infections, “I think they will prevail.”
