14 BARRON’S February 15, 2021
SVB Leerink analyst Dr. Geoffrey Porges
expects that the AstraZeneca, Novavax, and
Johnson & Johnson vaccines will be com-
peting with one another for mass-market
contracts.
“Already, consumers are thinking that
these products are interchangeable and
equivalent,” Porges says.
He expects that the ultracold storage
requirements of the Moderna and Pfizer
vaccines will put them at a disadvantage,
yet other industry analysts disagree with
that assessment.
Attributes that are competitive advan-
tages now might not matter much in the
longer term. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine
is given as a single dose, which is enor-
mously important this year, but that may
not mean much later, if companies are
competing to deliver single-dose boosters.
The decisive factor could be how well
the various companies can update their
vaccines in the short term to protect
against emerging strains.
“We believe that the mRNA and
Novavax platform...are more amenable to
multiple variants and high efficacy in one
construct,” says Jefferies analyst Michael
Yee. He suspects that efforts to update the
other vaccines to protect against multiple
variants may result in less-effective
vaccines.
Novavax hopes to be a dominant player.
CEO Erck says that he expects the Covid-
vaccines to compete on quality, and that his
company’s vaccine can stand above the oth-
ers. “The revenue projections are going to
be enormous for our product in 2021 and
2022, and beyond that,” he says. “Beyond
[2022]...it’s going to be a commercial mar-
ket based upon the competitive advantage
of your vaccine.”
The company is working on combining
its Covid-19 vaccine with its influenza vac-
cine, and expects to have the combination
vaccine in human trials in the second half
of this year.
Still, Novavax and the others will be
swimming with the big fish. In an inter-
view, the CEO of Sanofi, Paul Hudson,
pushed back on the idea that the pandemic
would lead to widespread changes in the
vaccine industry. He said that expectations
that messenger RNA vaccines will come to
dominate the field are overblown.
“In a single antigen pandemic, mRNA
is probably the first go-to,” Hudson said.
“But in regular times, I think we also have
to be clear, that if you’re coming into a
market with mRNA, say [the] influenza
[vaccine market], and you’re competing
with current influenza [vaccines], it’s very
different when you have to compete with
the standard of care with a well-character-
ized safety profile. So that bar is high.”B
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