LONDON (AP) – The head of drug maker AstraZeneca, which is developing a coronavirus vaccine widely expected to be approved by UK authorities this week, said on Sunday that researchers believe the shot will be effective against a new variant of the virus a rapid rise in infections in Great Britain.
AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot also told the Sunday Times that researchers developing the vaccine have come up with a ‘winning formula’ that makes the shot as effective as competing candidates.
Some have expressed concern that the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is being developed in partnership with the University of Oxford, may not be as good as the vaccine made by Pfizer and already distributed in the UK and other countries. Partial results suggest that the AstraZeneca injection is approximately 70% effective in preventing diseases from coronavirus infection, compared to the 95% efficacy reported by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech.
“We think we came up with the winning formula and how to get efficacy that, after two doses, is present in everyone else,” Soriot said. “I can’t tell you more because we will publish at some point.”
The UK government says its drug regulator is reviewing the latest data from AstraZeneca’s phase three clinical studies. The Times and others have reported that the green light could come Thursday, and the vaccines could be rolled out to the UK public in the first week of January.
When asked about the vaccine’s efficacy against the new variant of coronavirus spreading in the UK, Soriot said: “So far, we think the vaccine should remain effective. But we’re not sure, so we’re going to test that. ”
The UK authorities have blamed the new virus variant for rising infection rates across the country. They said the variant is much more transmissible, but stress, there is no evidence that it makes people sicker.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson raised an urgent alarm about the variant days before Christmas, saying the new version of the virus was spreading quickly and plans to travel and collect for millions should be canceled. Authorities have since put more and more parts of the country – affecting about 24 million people, or 43% of the population – under the strictest restrictions.
Many countries were quickly banned from travel to the UK, but cases of the new variant have since been reported in a dozen locations around the world as well.
Public health officials said on Dec. 24 that more than 600,000 people had received the first of two doses of the Pfizer vaccine.