FRANKFURT (Reuters) – AstraZeneca denied on Monday that the COVID-19 vaccine is not very effective for people over 65, after German media reports said officials fear the vaccine may not be approved in the European Union. for use in the elderly.
The German daily newspapers Handelsblatt and Bild said in separate reports that the vaccine – co-developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford – had an efficacy of 8% or less than 10%, respectively, in people over 65.
German officials fear the vaccine may not receive approval from the EU EMA drug authority for use in people over 65, Bild said in its online edition.
The reports mark another potential problem for AstraZeneca, which told the EU on Friday that it could not meet the supply targets agreed by the end of March, after facing problems with vaccine production.
Frustration was already growing among European countries because Pfizer and partner BioNTech announced a temporary reduction in vaccine supply in early January.
In a written response, AstraZeneca described German media reports saying its vaccine COVID-19 was shown to have very low efficacy in the elderly as “completely incorrect”.
He said Britain’s Joint Vaccination and Immunization Committee supported the use of the vaccine in the elderly. He also said that a strong immune response to the vaccine was demonstrated in blood tests of elderly participants.
On December 30, Britain became the first country to approve the double vaccine and did not impose an age limit. So far, she has focused on the elderly and health professionals for her immunization campaign.
The main clinical trial of AstraZeneca in Great Britain began to be tested in adults aged 55 years or older, because it initially focused on health professionals and active frontline workers.
Elderly trial participants were later recruited so that infections, which are necessary to arrive at reliable efficacy data, would also come later.
Researchers at the University of Oxford said in an article published in the medical journal The Lancet on December 8, when details of major vaccine tests conducted in Britain and Brazil were released, that infection-based efficacy data in the elderly were still poor. limited.
“Data on the effectiveness of these cohorts is currently limited by the small number of cases (of infection), but additional data will be available in future analyzes,” they said in the article.
Reporting by Ludwig Burger and Edward Taylor; edition by Richard Pullin