According to the company, the vaccine is 90 percent effective at preventing covid-19 infection if someone gets half the dose and then the full dose within a month.
Another dosing schedule demonstrated 62 percent efficacy. He was given two full doses for at least a month. Combined analysis of both dosing regimens resulted in an average efficacy of 70 percent. All results are statistically significant, Reuters writes.
What about side effects?
AstraZeneca assures that the vaccine was not associated with serious side effects and was well tolerated by the people taking the tests in both dosing regimens. “The efficacy and safety of the vaccine confirm that it will be highly effective against covid-19 and have an immediate impact on this public health emergency,” AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said in a statement.
The UK drug maker’s preliminary results are another groundbreaking announcement in the fight against the pandemic, which has already claimed nearly 1.4 million lives and negatively impacted the global economy, the agency warned.
The minister tells about fantastic news
UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock called Oxford’s vaccination data “fantastic news”. “Figures show that the vaccine can be up to 90 percent effective at the right dose,” Hancock confirmed to Sky News television that the government had ordered 100 million doses.
“We hope to be able to start vaccinating next month,” Hancock told the BBC. It must then be vaccinated in bulk in the first three months of next year. “And we hope things will return to normal sometime after Easter”, predicted the minister.
Pam Cheng of the company’s management said today that AstraZeneca will have enough new vaccines for the world for 200 million doses by the end of this year and enough active ingredient for 700 million doses by the end of the first quarter of next year.
In Britain in particular, there will be enough vaccine for 20 million doses later this year, and there will be enough 70 million doses by the end of the first quarter of next year. She also stressed that the company will hold inventories of the substance pending approval by individual drug regulators around the world.
Cheng expects final vaccine doses to yield four million by the end of the year and 40 million by the end of the first quarter of next year. The figures to which it refers only refer to the batches produced directly by AstraZeneca and not to its partner company.
Hundreds of millions of doses
Soriot noted that AstraZeneca together with its partners will be able to produce hundreds of millions of batches very soon, up to three billion, according to Cheng. According to her, the company also partners with more than 20 supplier partners.
AstraZeneca’s head of research and development, Mene Pangalos, said the applications for vaccine approval had been filed in the UK and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and is talking to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this week.
Two US pharmaceutical companies have also published promising results in recent weeks regarding the effectiveness of their vaccines. In mid-November, Moderna announced that its experimental vaccine so far had an efficacy of 94.6 percent. A week earlier, Pfizer announced that its vaccine, developed in collaboration with the German company BioNTech, was up to 95 percent effective.
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