Shortly before the decision on the approval of the corona vaccine from the British manufacturer AstraZeneca in the United Kingdom, the company reassured the full reliability of its product. “We believe that we have found the winning formula,” said Pascal Soriot, CEO of the Sunday Times. The vaccine from AstraZeneca could offer “100 percent protection” against severe forms of disease with the Covid-19 pathogen.
AstraZeneca worked with Oxford University to develop its vaccine. The formulation has now been found that “works just as well as the other” previously approved vaccines with two doses, said Soriot. He was also confident that the AstraZeneca vaccine would also be effective against the corona mutation, which was recently discovered in the UK.
The decision of the British health authority MHRA on the market approval of the AstraZeneca vaccine is expected in the coming days, according to the “Sunday Times” it should be made on Monday. The UK pioneered coronavirus vaccination. At the beginning of December, the country was the first country in Western Europe to issue emergency approval for the corona vaccine, which was developed by the German company Biontech together with its US partner Pfizer. More than 600,000 British people have now been vaccinated with it.
Comparatively cheap
However, the British government relies primarily on the vaccine from AstraZeneca and has already ordered 100 million doses of this vaccine in advance. There are high hopes for this vaccine because it is comparatively cheap and does not have to be stored at such low temperatures as competing products such as that from Biontech-Pfizer. This makes storage and transport much easier.
At the end of November, AstraZeneca had stated after studies that its vaccine had an average effectiveness of 70 percent. With the competition it is over 90 percent, which is why questions about effectiveness arose. The British pharmaceutical company emphasized that a smaller group of test persons also had results of 90 percent effectiveness.
The test subjects in this smaller group accidentally received half a dose of the vaccine and a month later a full dose. With them, the effectiveness was 90 percent. Another, much larger test group had received the full active ingredient twice – here the effectiveness was only 62 percent. The company therefore promised additional studies.
