Novavax sees some COVID-19 vaccine trial dropout as Pfizer, Moderna rollouts gear up

As more supplies of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s authorized COVID-19 vaccines arrive, many states are expanding their reach beyond the elderly and into the 65-plus crowd. That broader rollout has created some problems for clinical trials of other experimental shots. Novavax’s phase 3 trial of its COVID-19 candidate NVX-CoV2373 has received drop-out requests from some participants 65 or older as New York said it’s now vaccinating people of that age group, The Washington Post reported. One Long Island physician told the Post that the trial site he managed has received a “significant” number of calls asking to be unblinded from the study and that recruitment is getting harder because “all of a sudden the people over 65 became less interested.”