FRANKFURT (Reuters) – AstraZeneca on Monday denied that its COVID-19 vaccine is not very effective for people over the age of 65, after German media reported that officials fear the vaccine may not be approved in the European Union for use in the elderly.
German daily newspapers Handelsblatt and Bild said in separate reports that the vaccine – co-developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University – had an efficacy of 8% or less than 10% in people over 65, respectively.
German officials were concerned that the vaccine might not receive approval from the EU’s medicines authority EMA for use in people over 65, Bild said in his online edition.
The reports highlight another potential problem for AstraZeneca, which told the EU on Friday that it could not meet its agreed supply targets until the end of March following problems with vaccine production.
Frustration among European countries was already growing as Pfizer and partner BioNTech announced a temporary delay in vaccine supply earlier in January.
In a written response, AstraZeneca described German media reports saying that the COVID-19 vaccine was found to have very low efficacy in the elderly as “completely false”.
It said the UK Joint Vaccination and Immunization Committee supported the use of the vaccine in the elderly. It also said a strong immune response to the vaccine had been shown in blood analysis of older trial participants.
Britain became the first country to approve the two-step vaccine on December 30 and did not set an upper age limit. It has so far targeted the elderly and health professionals for its immunization campaign.
AstraZeneca’s main trial in Britain began with testing on adults as young as 55 years old, as it initially targeted medical staff and frontline active duty workers.
Older subjects were later recruited so that infections needed to provide reliable efficacy data also came in later.
Researchers at the University of Oxford said in an article published December 8 in the medical journal The Lancet, when details of key vaccine studies in Britain and Brazil were released, that efficacy data based on infections in the elderly was still limited .
“Efficacy data in these cohorts is currently limited by the small number of (infection) cases, but additional data will be available in future analyzes,” they said in the paper.
Reporting by Ludwig Burger and Edward Taylor; edited by Richard Pullin