AstraZeneca announces a vaccine with an average efficacy of 70%.
It is one of the vaccines long announced to fight the Covid-19 epidemic, the one developed by the company Astra Zeneca. This Monday morning, the pharmaceutical company announced that its vaccine against COVID-19, developed in collaboration with Oxford University, shows the efficacy of 70% according to preliminary results of phase III clinical trial.
The British pharmaceutical group and the university explained that this figure was obtained by combining data collected from two experimental protocols.
The vaccine called AZD1222 has been tested in the United Kingdom and Brazil. It is a very effective vaccine according to its developers, who report no hospitalization or serious cases of disease in participants who received the vaccine.
“The efficacy and safety of this vaccine confirm that it will be highly effective against COVID-19 and will have an immediate impact on this public health emergency,” said Pascal Soriot, managing director of the UK group, in a statement.
Preliminary results include trials involving more than 20,000 people, 131 of whom have contracted the disease. The group says it is making rapid progress in the planned manufacture of 3 billion doses, which will be available in 2021.
Two different protocols
Astra Zeneca has studied two different protocols and one is more effective than the other. The efficacy of its candidate vaccine, AZD1222, was measured at 70 percent by combining data from the two protocols. The first protocol, 90% effective, consists of administering a half dose and then one dose at least one month apart. The second protocol, 62% effective, consisted of two doses administered one month apart.
The company is relying heavily on the one that has been shown to be 90% effective. Professor Andrew Pollard, the lead investigator of the vaccine trial at Oxford, says: “These results show that we have an effective vaccine that will save many lives. We were excited to see that one of our dosing regimens could be about 90 percent effective and that if this dosing regimen is used, more people could be vaccinated with a planned vaccine supply”.
The pharmaceutical company does not provide further details to explain the difference in effectiveness between the two protocols.
Less effective but easier to store
This vaccine is currently less effective than the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine, which is more than 90% effective. But it uses more traditional technology than these two competitors, which makes it less expensive and easier to store since it does not need to be kept at very low temperatures.
Thanks to a “simple supply chain,” the vaccine “will be accessible and available worldwide,” says Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca, quoted in the release.
