Serum Institute of India Executive Director Adar Poonawalla on Monday expressed “some preliminary good news” about the efficacy of early covid vaccines, particularly the Oxford candidate vaccine developed by the University of Oxford with AstraZeneca Plc after an article de Bloomberg published that the Oxford covid vaccine “has produced a robust immune response in older adults and the elderly, those most at risk of severe disease.”
“A lot of people were wondering and wondering if these early vaccines will be effective for the elderly and the most vulnerable, here’s some preliminary good news,” Poonawalla tweeted while sharing the Bloomberg article.
British drugmaker AstraZeneca Plc said Monday that its vaccine elicits an immune response in both young and older adults, raising hopes of emerging from the sadness and economic destruction brought on by the new coronavirus.
The experimental vaccine developed in collaboration with the University of Oxford also triggers lower adverse responses among the elderly, AstraZeneca Plc added.
A vaccine that works is seen as a game changer in the battle against the new coronavirus, which has killed more than 1.15 million people, closed swaths of the global economy and turned the normal lives of billions upside down. of people.
“It is encouraging to see that immunogenicity responses were similar between older and younger adults and that reactogenicity was lower in older adults, where the severity of COVID-19 disease is greatest,” an AstraZeneca spokesperson said, Reuters reported.
“The results further build the body of evidence for AZD1222’s safety and immunogenicity,” the spokesperson said, referring to the technical name of the vaccine.
The Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine is expected to be one of the first big pharma to gain regulatory approval, along with the candidate from Pfizer and BioNTech, as the world tries to chart a path out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The news that older people get an immune response from the vaccine is positive because the immune system weakens with age and older people are most at risk of dying from the virus.
If it works, a vaccine would allow the world to return to some normalcy after the tumult of the pandemic.
British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said that a vaccine was not ready yet, but that he was preparing logistics for a possible deployment mainly in the first half of 2021.
When asked if some people could get a vaccine this year, he told the BBC: “I don’t rule that out, but that is not my central expectation.”
“The program is progressing well, (but) we are not there yet,” Hancock said.
Work on the Oxford vaccine began in January. Called AZD1222 or ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, the viral vector vaccine is made from a weakened version of a common cold virus that causes infections in chimpanzees.
Trust staff at a London hospital have been told to be ready to receive the first batches of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine, The Sun newspaper reported Monday.
Meanwhile, vaccine development in India is also showing progress. India can receive a COVID-19 vaccine by March 2021, revealed Dr. Suresh Jadhav, executive director of the Serum Institute of India. “India can receive COVID-19 vaccine by March 2021 as long as regulators notify processes quickly as various manufacturers are working on it,” Dr Jadhav said at the India Vaccine Accessibility Electronic Summit hosted by the HEAL Foundation in association with ICCIDD.
Called AZD1222 or ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, the vaccine is a combined viral vector vaccine. It uses a weakened version of a chimpanzee common cold virus that encodes instructions for making proteins from the new coronavirus to generate an immune response and prevent infection. The vaccine is likely to provide protection for about a year, AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said in June. According to a report published in the British medical journal The Lancet, the COVID-19 vaccine produced a dual immune response in people ages 18 to 55.
With contributions from the agency
.
