AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine can be 90% effective, results show

 

British drugs group AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford say their jointly-developed vaccine against COVID-19 has shown “an average efficacy of 70 percent” in trials.
“This vaccine’s efficacy and safety confirm that it will be highly effective against COVID-19 and will have an immediate impact on this public health emergency,” AstraZeneca chief executive Pascal Soriot said in a statement on Monday.
The results ranged between 62 and 90-percent efficacy, depending on the vaccine dosage.
The 70-percent average is lower compared with the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines trialled by rivals Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna which have come in above 90 percent.
AstraZeneca said it will immediately apply for early approval of the vaccine where possible, and it will seek an emergency use listing from the World Health Organization, so it can make the shot available in low-income countries.Monday’s statement said: “Positive high-level results from an interim analysis of clinical trials of AZD1222 in the UK and Brazil showed the vaccine was highly effective in preventing COVID-19… and no hospitalisations or severe cases of the disease were reported in participants.”
It added: “One dosing regimen (n=2,741) showed vaccine efficacy of 90 percent when AZD1222 was given as a half dose, followed by a full dose at least one month apart.”
The pair said that regimen n=8,895 showed 62-percent efficacy when given as two full doses at least one month apart.
“The combined analysis from both dosing regimens (n=11,636) resulted in an average efficacy of 70 percent.”
‘Quicker, cheaper’
AstraZeneca said it would “immediately prepare regulatory submission of the data to authorities around the world that have a framework in place for conditional or early approval”.
It added that it would seek emergency-use listing from the World Health Organization to accelerate vaccine availability in low-income countries.
Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull, reporting from London, said: “It has been shown that this vaccine is far more practical than the other vaccines that are going for a regulatory approval in the United States, in a sense that it is able to be stored at 2 to 8 degrees, as opposed to, for instance, minus 70 degrees in the case of the Pfizer vaccine.