LONDON (UK) – Data from Britain’s vaccine rollout on the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca/Oxford University COVID-19 shot in older people should show the way for other countries so as to make a reassessment of their use of it, said the head of the university’s vaccine research group on Tuesday.
Britain has been rolling out the vaccine since January, starting with the elderly and health workers, after getting approval for its use for all adults.
Many European countries have advised that the vaccine should not be provided to over-65s because of a lack of clinical trial data on its efficacy in that age group, and a significant proportion of doses of the vaccine that they have acquired have not been put to use.
Though there was limited efficacy data in clinical trials, real world data being generated by Britain’s vaccine rollout, has shown both AstraZeneca and Pfizer’s shot are more than 80% effective in preventing hospitalisations in over-80s after one shot.
Public Health England (PHE) also said that protection against symptomatic COVID in those over-70 is between 60-73% four weeks after receiving the first shot of Oxford-AstraZeneca’s vaccine, when compared to 57-61% for one dose of Pfizer-BioNTech’s one.
When asked whether other countries should look at real world data from Public Health England and reconsider how the shot is being used, Oxford Vaccine Group’s Andrew Pollard said: “I think that the scientific committees in each of these countries will be doing exactly that over the days ahead.”
“The strength of evidence that we’re now seeing… all of that is being accessed by scientific committees in different countries, and I’m sure will help support their decision-making,” he told BBC radio.