Meredith WadmanScience's COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.The small biotech firm Novavax, once considered a dark horse in the COVID-19 vaccine race, announced today that its candidate delivered high efficacy—89.3%—in a pivotal trial in the United Kingdom where a new, highly transmissible variant of the pandemic coronavirus accounted for more than half of the cases in people in the trial.“These are spectacular results,” Clive Dix, chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, said about the results from the trial, which enrolled more than 15,000 people. “This is an incredible achievement that will ensure we can protect individuals in the UK and the rest of the world from this virus.”But the.