Britain Authorizes Covid-19 Vaccine From Oxford and AstraZeneca
Health officials are hoping to soon vaccinate a million people per week as the country’s hospitals are overwhelmed by cases of a new, more contagious variant of the virus.
Production of AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine at a facility in Pune, India. Britain has ordered 100 million doses, 40 million of which are supposed to be available by March, making the AstraZeneca shot the linchpin of its vaccination strategy.
Production of AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine at a facility in Pune, India. Britain has ordered 100 million doses, 40 million of which are supposed to be available by March, making the AstraZeneca shot the linchpin of its vaccination strategy.Credit…Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters
By Benjamin Mueller and Rebecca Robbins
Dec. 30, 2020Updated 3:23 a.m. ET
LONDON — Britain became the first country on Wednesday to give emergency authorization to the coronavirus vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, opening a path for a cheap and easy-to-store shot that much of the world will rely on to help end the pandemic.
In a bold decision to accelerate vaccinations, a British government advisory body directed clinicians to give as many people as possible their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, without reserving supplies for planned second doses.
Instead of administering the two shots within a month, clinicians will wait as long as 12 weeks to give people their second doses, the government said, a decision that applies to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as well as the Pfizer-BioNTech shot that Britain authorized early this month.
With the vaccination rollout moving slowly in both Britain and the United States, British officials were heeding calls to delay the second doses as a way of giving more people the partial protection of a single dose. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, said people would start receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine early next week.
For Britain, where hospitals are overwhelmed by a deluge of cases of a new, more contagious variant of the virus, the decision by its drug regulator offered some hope of a reprieve. The health service is preparing to soon vaccinate a million people per week at makeshift sites in soccer stadiums and racecourses.
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The Oxford-AstraZeneca shot is poised to become the world’s dominant form of inoculation. At $3 to $4 a dose, it is a fraction of the cost of some other vaccines. And it can be shipped and stored at normal refrigeration temperatures for six months, rather than in the ultracold freezers required by rival vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, making it easier to administer to people in poorer and harder-to-reach parts of the world.
When given in two, full-strength doses, AstraZeneca’s vaccine showed 62 percent efficacy in clinical trials — considerably lower than the roughly 95 percent efficacy achieved by Pfizer and Moderna’s shots. For reasons scientists don’t yet understand, AstraZeneca’s vaccine showed 90 percent efficacy in a smaller group of volunteers who were given a half-strength initial dose.
In announcing the authorization on Wednesday, Britain’s Department of Health did not immediately outline which dosing regimen had been authorized, or whether clinicians would be given leeway to choose between the two.
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Beyond the dosing questions, Britain’s health service must also figure out how to persuade people to take a vaccine that appears less effective than other available shots, but that nevertheless could hasten the end of a pandemic that has been killing hundreds of people each day in Britain and thousands more around the world.
The authorization relied on data from late-stage clinical trials in Britain and Brazil. India’s drug regulator is also expected to decide soon whether to authorize the vaccine, which is being manufactured there by a local vaccine producer, the Serum Institute.
The New York Times
Me: so Modena is 95% effective, The Chinese vaccine is 79% effective and the Oxford Vaccine is 65% effective – so really the English one is more a 50/50 chance of the vaccine protecting you from Covid, or not – I don’t see that as an acceptable result – especially as you won’t know if you are protected from Covid, until you get another dose and by then it could be far too late for you.
95% – Yes OK, anything less, no thanks – big time.