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A third anti-Covid vaccine, developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, has been shown to be 70% effective in large-scale clinical trials.
Various doses were tested and one of them proved to be 90% effective. The news comes after other serums, developed by Pfizer and Moderna, were 95% effective. However, the Oxford serum is much cheaper, easier to store and distribute. AstraZeneca has announced that it will be able to produce 3 billion doses next year. It is already manufactured in 10 places around the world.
AstraZeneca announced Monday morning that the vaccine developed against Sars-Cov-2 in conjunction with the University of Oxford has an average efficiency of 70%, with no significant side effects. However, the protection provided by the serum reaches 90% when the vaccine was given half a dose in the first inoculation, followed, after one month, by a full dose. Another variant tested was the administration of two full doses one month apart, with an efficacy of only 62%.
Teresa Lambe, Principal Investigator, Oxford Vaccine Development Team: “It was a difficult time for me and for everyone involved, I ended up in the situation that my own children no longer recognize me, I tell their father’s mother, because he is the father who took care of them in recent months.”
An average efficiency of just 70% may seem disappointing compared to the 95% protection reported by Modern and Pfizer. However, it is a much better result than the seasonal flu vaccine. In addition, the British serum has other advantages, which should not be neglected.
It is five times cheaper than the Pfizer vaccine and even eight times cheaper than Moderna’s American product.
More importantly, the AstraZeneca serum will be able to be distributed to all corners of the world much more easily.
Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for the British Ministry of Health: “The local vaccine is easier to administer than the Pfizer vaccine because it does not require storage at minus 70 degrees Celsius.”
David Nabarro, WHO, responsible for Covid-19: “First of all, it is a vaccine that can be kept in normal refrigerators for longer.”
In the last stage of the clinical trials, 20 thousand volunteers participated, in the Kingdom and in Brazil. 131 of them took COVID, but only 30 of them had received the real serum, the others, placebo. None of them developed a severe form of the disease.
Lois Clay Baker, Vaccine Participant: “It helps at the macro level, not having patients in intensive care, but also at the micro level, so that family members can come to visit their patients in the hospital, so that I can take the train to visit my parents without worrying. I think the vaccine will change everything. “
On the other hand, Americans would be the first to benefit from the life-saving vaccine, starting on December 11. The US company Pfizer and its German partner Biontech have already applied for emergency approval for their serum. The Federal Drug Authority Commission, which must approve the vaccine, has scheduled a meeting for December 10.
Dr. Moncef Slaoui, Consultant-șef, Operation Warp Speed: “Our plan is to send the doses to the testing centers within 24 hours of receiving approval.”
In Europe, Spain has announced that large-scale vaccination will begin in January 2021.
Pedro Sánchez, Prime Minister of Spain: “I would like to inform you that our country and Germany are the first European countries to have a complete anti-Covid vaccination plan. We have been working on this project since September. They will have 13,000 vaccination centers. In the most reasonable scenario, a substantial part of the population will be vaccinated in the first semester of 2021 ”.
