New COVID vaccine could be on the way, but this one's different than the others

HOUSTON - A new Covid vaccine could soon be made available and sound more suitable for millions of people who are not vaccinated.

Novavax recently submitted data for emergency use authorization and the U.S. government is funding some studies.

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In layman’s terms, Dr. Luis Ostrosky with UTHealth Houston says Novavax is more old-school technology than the others.

"It’s more in the lines of taking pieces or antigens of the virus and train our bodies to recognize it," he said. "Traditional vaccine technology has always taken little pieces of the virus, inactive virus, and injected that to train our immune system to recognize and neutralize it. This is exactly what this vaccine does."

Just like the flu vaccine.

Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson and Johnson use mRNA technology.

"The difference between this and the mRNA vaccines is the mRNA vaccines, we inject the instructions to make those proteins in our own cells. We don’t directly inject the protein themselves," he said. "The data for Novavax looks pretty good from the clinical trials, but by this time we have administered the mRNA vaccine to billions of people worldwide, and we know the known side effects and known issues. We are just barely going to start learning those with Novavax."

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Still, Dr. Ostrosky says he recommends it.

"If people are more comfortable with this more traditional technology, then by all means take this one," he said.

There’s no timeline for the FDA’s review of the Novavax vaccine, but we do know it is currently being reviewed.