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LONDON – Cheap and easy to store, the AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine, due to launch in Britain on Monday, has given a significant boost to the global fight against coronavirus.
Here are five long-awaited vaccine facts.
Practic sense
The AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine has the main advantages of being inexpensive, costing around £ 2.50 ($ 3.40, € 2.75) per dose, and easy to store.
It can be kept at normal refrigerator temperatures of between two and eight degrees Celsius (36-46 degrees Fahrenheit), making it ideal for large-scale vaccination programs, and both India and Argentina recently approved its use.
Britain will begin mass launch of the vaccine on Monday, with 530,000 doses ready for immediate use and the government expects “tens of millions” in three months.
In contrast, Moderna vaccine should be stored at -20 ° C, while Pfizer / BioNTech product should be kept at -70 ° C.
New variant
The vaccine should be able to fight the new variant of the coronavirus responsible for an increase in cases in the UK, according to AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot.
“Until now, we believe that the vaccine should remain effective. But we cannot be sure, so we are going to test that,” he told The Sunday Times.
New versions are being developed just in case, he revealed, adding: “You have to be prepared.”
British product
The vaccine developed by the British firm AstraZeneca, in collaboration with the University of Oxford, is the second to be approved by the independent Medicines and Health Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).
The Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine has been rolled out in Britain since Dec. 8, with about a million receiving their first dose, according to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
His government is fighting one of the worst outbreaks in the world, with more than 75,000 deaths so far of those testing positive for the disease.
Britain has ordered 100 million doses of the AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine.
AstraZeneca said it expects to be able to manufacture around three billion doses of its vaccine worldwide by 2021.
Chimpanzees
The vaccine is “virus-vectorized,” which means it is a version of a virus that normally infects chimpanzees and has been modified with a portion of the COVID-19 coronavirus called a “spike protein” to activate the immune system.
Once in human cells, the vaccine should help stimulate the production of antibodies that recognize the virus.
The vaccine is “safe and effective,” according to data published by the medical journal The Lancet on December 8, and only one of the 23,754 volunteers who participated in the trials experienced “possibly related serious side effects.”
It is a case of a rare neurological disease, transverse myelitis, which forced the trials to be temporarily suspended.
Result confusion
The British lab announced in interim findings in November that its vaccine had an average effectiveness of 70 percent, compared with more than 90 percent for Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna.
The efficacy of the AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine was 90 percent for volunteers who first received only half the dose and then a full dose a month later, but only 62 percent for those in another group who were vaccinated with two full doses one month apart.
The half-dose injection was done by accident, drawing criticism about the robustness of the results and prompting the company to announce on November 26 that a “further study” would be conducted on the efficacy of the reduced dose.
“We think we have discovered the winning formula and how to get an efficacy that, after two doses, is on par with all the others,” Soriot told The Sunday Times. – AFP
