In this Motley Fool Live video, recorded on May 5, 2021, Motley Fool contributors Keith Speights and Brian Orelli discuss whether or not Covaxin’s success against emerging variants could help make Ocugen a big winner in the U.S.
The company announced this week some studies that showed that the COVID-19 vaccine Covaxin appears to be effective against three of the new coronavirus variants.
They took the antibodies and looked at whether they could neutralize the different variants and that was able to neutralize the Brazil variant, the UK variant, and the India double mutant variant.
It’s certainly good news and it will likely translate into protection of humans, but there’s no way to know unless you run a prospective study and then look and see how many people that got placebo got infected with the different variants, and then how many people who got the vaccine were infected with the variants and show that there is a difference there.
They licensed this drug from Bharat Biotech in India, but we still don’t know whether the FDA will accept the study that was run by Bharat Biotech to gain emergency use authorization in the US, and that’s the only place where Ocugen and it’s still an open question.
Although over the longer term, a vaccine that can be effective against variants could have a shot anyway, no pun intended, could have a shot at being a success in the U.S.