Britain authorized the emergency use of a second COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday, becoming the first country to give the go-ahead for an easier-to-use injection, which developers hope is the ‘vaccine for the world’ will be. ”.
The Department of Health indicated it had accepted the recommendation of the Medicines and Medical Products Regulatory Agency to approve the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and the British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.
Britain has bought 100 million doses of the vaccine and plans to start administering it in the coming days. Hundreds of thousands of people in the UK have already received a different vaccine, developed by the US pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German ally BioNTech.
AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said “Today is an important day for millions of people in the UK who will have access to this new vaccine. It has been shown to be effective, well tolerated and easier to administer, and is provided by AstraZeneca on a non-profit basis. “
“We would like to thank our colleagues at AstraZeneca, the University of Oxford, the UK Government and the tens of thousands of clinical trial participants,” he added.
The partial results of the studies involving nearly 24,000 people in Great Britain, Brazil and South Africa suggest that the injection is safe and about 70% effective in preventing disease from coronavirus infection.
Its effectiveness is not as high as that of other potential vaccines, but Soriot recently told the Sunday Times that he was confident the vaccine will prove to be as effective as that of rival companies.
Coronavirus vaccines are usually given in two doses: a first injection and a booster about three weeks later.
But the UK government said that with the AstraZeneca vaccine, the priority would be to give a single dose to as many people as possible, which is believed to provide tremendous protection against the virus. He indicated that the highest-risk population would be injected first and that they would all receive a second dose about 12 weeks after the first injection.
“The campaign will start on January 4 and will only really gain momentum in the first weeks of next year,” UK Health Minister Matt Hancock told Sky News.
Several countries are expected to depend on the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine for its low cost, availability and ease of use. It can be kept in refrigerators instead of the freezers that other vaccines usually require. The company has said it will sell each dose for $ 2.50 and plans to make approximately 3 billion doses by the end of 2021.
“We have a vaccine for the world,” said one of the study leaders, Dr. Andrew Pollard of the University of Oxford.