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the vaccinations in Italy today they are close to one million three hundred thousand. In other words, if the daily rate reached last week had been maintained – about 80 thousand administrations every 24 hours – it would have been possible to reach the goal set by the Emergency Commissioner Domenico Arcuri of 6 million vaccinated as of March. The delays also announced for the next 3 weeks by Pfizer-BioNTech, however, and the consequent 28 thousand inoculations registered on average in the last days, run the risk of causing everything to be postponed.
To do this, it is essential to have the 8 million doses expected from Italy available as soon as possible by March AstraZeneca Oxford However, for this to happen – as Arcuri himself explained yesterday at the press conference – the authorization of theMother, the European regulatory body. A final ok is expected for January 29, which, as we know from Italian sources close to the structure of the EU, “It could be anticipated in 1 or 2 days.” This was also confirmed by the Austrian Prime Minister, Sebastian Kurz, who yesterday announced that he was “working with the other EU countries for a faster approval and with less bureaucracy than AstraZeneca and other vaccines ”. The objective, in practice, is to be able to replicate what has already happened for the validation of Pfizer and Moderna, recovering at least 48 hours.
About half of these, however, will be used by Aifa (Italian Medicines Agency) to give the green light to the English serum when defining the percentage of equivalence with respect to the vaccines already used. “AstraZeneca is the vaccine that is in the most advanced phase in terms of authorization review by Ema – explains Giorgio Palù, microbiologist and president of Aifa – But in phase 3 now there are also CureVac and Johnson & Johnson. The first is developed by a German company, in collaboration with Bayer, and uses messenger RNA such as Pfizer and Moderna. J&J, for its part, which has just published the work on phase 2 but is already in phase 3, uses adenovirus as a vector. For these, however, we will still need time.
At the moment, therefore, it is not possible to establish exactly when, after AstraZeneca, the other “reinforcements” will arrive but, according to current evaluations, we are thinking in the perspective of a few months. Therefore, the time horizon for approval is spring. However, taking into account that they are single-dose vaccines and that, in the case of J&J, they have announced an efficacy of 80%.
In the meantime, however, the countdown for Russian and Chinese vaccines has just begun. In fact, EMA is working on the results produced so far by both Sputnik V and SinoVac. In the first case, the scientific review ended on January 19 and now it is preparing to start the authorization process that will take a few months. In the second, on the other hand, the evaluations could take even longer, probably not before the summer, because first it will be necessary to understand whether the rigor used in conducting the analyzes and experiments is adequate for European standards.
In addition, Sputnik V already obtained two important starts yesterday. The first is Hungary, which approved it under the authorization procedure for emergency use, the first EU country to do so (the vaccine is already in use in Argentina, Bolivia, Serbia, Algeria, Palestine and Belarus). And the second, more significant, from German Chancellor Angela Merkel: “If the vaccine is approved by the EMA, we can talk about agreements on production and even use.” Not only that, Merkel stressed that she had offered that through the Paul Ehrlich Institute Russia has “support in the development” of the vaccine. “Beyond the wide political differences, we can certainly work together in a pandemic, in a humanitarian sector,” the foreign minister explained.
On the Chinese front, however, doubts remain greater. What is worrying, without taking into account that the vaccine is already widely used in various countries of the world, are the different results obtained from the tests carried out by the experts. The proven effectiveness in Turkey, for example, is 91%, while in Brazil it was between 50 and 60%. A wide range, on which the hopes of millions of people are based.
Last update: 00:36
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