All 3 vaccines approved in the U.S., from Pfizer, Moderna, and Novavax, are basically in the same ballpark with efficacy.
CDC – Staying Up to Date with COVID-19 Vaccines – October 3, 2024
https://www.cdc.gov/covid/vaccines/stay-up-to-date.html
- Everyone ages 6 months and older should get a 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine.
- The COVID-19 vaccine helps protect you from severe disease, hospitalization, and death.
- It is especially important to get your 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine if you are ages 65 and older, are at high risk for severe COVID-19, or have never received a COVID-19 vaccine.
- Vaccine protection decreases over time, so it is important to stay up to date with your COVID-19 vaccine.
There really haven’t been head to head studies of the 3 covid vaccines, of any size to say much about comparing them directly. But they all wane in efficacy over time, and that’s why there are updated versions and why people need to stay up-to-date to stay topped up. All the vaccines have pretty similar minor side-effects. And all 3 have been shown to be safe — the benefits far outweigh any rare risks. However a lot of people on social media wrongly assume that some studies proved that Novavax is particularly superior. That’s not true, but it’s something they heard awhile back and it stuck.
The Novavax craze is thanks to a couple of misrepresented studies people got excited about at some point, and it got hyped up. A lot of this could be emanating originally from people invested in Novavax or involved in the meme stock factor.
Often people will hype the shit out of anything that is rosy about a particular stock and I suspect there are troll farms and probably botnets paid to do so, because that’s what people do nowadays in the information landscape and the internet of fakes.
Many overly rosy posts about Novavax on social media include the stock symbol which is kind of a giveaway! There’s substantial money involved. Novavax is one of the most shorted stocks too. So there’s plenty of interest in manipulating online conversations and creating controversy about the product, in order to manipulate the perceptions, the automated systems monitoring social media for stock signals, and people trying to influence the stock market.
I’m concerned some could be trying to orchestrate something akin to a pump & dump scheme. That would be really bad because it would mean that the volatility could harm the company. There may be people with some interest in just that, to see the company fail — the people shorting the stock. And what that would mean for patients is there would be one less viable vaccine available for people to choose.
There are also some operatives who seem to have made it a central project of their lives to promote Novavax by making over the top claims that are not accurate — wild claims like that it has no side-effects or can cure long covid — and also by crapping on, not just other covid vaccines with anti-vax disinformation, but even fear mongering about TDAP. None of that makes any sense because it’s not about real healthcare information, and it’s probably not even activism.
Novavax is a perfectly acceptable choice of vaccine. But making wild claims about it can backfire and harm the vaccine effort broadly. Public health interest should come before financial markets, which also should only exist to serve humans. Making Novavax into a meme stock in some kind of stock market casino game is a threat to public health.