LONDON (AP) – Britain’s chief of health praised a new study suggesting that a single dose of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine provides a high level of protection for 12 weeks, saying it supports the government’s contentious strategy of delaying the second injection. can protect more people quickly with the first dose.
Britain’s decision was criticized as risky by other European countries, but Health Secretary Matt Hancock said on Wednesday that the study “supports the strategy we have adopted and shows the world that the Oxford vaccine works effectively” .
Hancock’s comments came after the University of Oxford released a study showing that the vaccine reduced the transmission of the virus by two-thirds and prevented serious illnesses.
Mene Pangalos, executive vice president of research and development of biopharmaceuticals at AstraZeneca, said that no patient experienced severe COVID-19 or needed hospitalization three weeks after receiving the first dose, and that the effectiveness appeared to increase up to 12 weeks after the initial injection. .
“Our data suggest that you want to be as close to 12 weeks as possible” for the second dose, Pangalos said during a news conference.
The study has not yet been peer-reviewed and has not addressed the dosage of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the other currently in use in the UK. Pfizer recommends that your injections be given 21 days apart and has not endorsed the UK government’s decision to increase the time between doses.
But the Oxford survey was enthusiastically received by British authorities under pressure to justify their decision to postpone the second dose.
“This reduction in transmission, as well as the fact that there are no hospitalizations, the combination of this is very good news. And it categorically supports the strategy that we have adopted in having a 12-week interval between doses, ”Hancock told Sky News.
Some countries, including France, have authorized the AstraZeneca vaccine for use only in people under the age of 65, saying there is insufficient evidence to say whether it works in older adults. Belgium authorized only for people aged 55 and under.
Still, one of the lead researchers on the Oxford vaccine project, Dr. Andrew Pollard, said “we hope it will be highly effective in older adults” and said that more data should be available in the coming weeks.
Pangalos noted that the European Medicines Agency has authorized the vaccine for use by everyone over 18 years of age.
“How individual countries decide to implement vaccines depends, ultimately, on the vaccine supplies they have,” he said.
The supply of vaccines is a sensitive issue in the European Union, which regrets that AstraZeneca has reduced the number of doses it plans to supply to the EU in the short term. The company said last month that it planned to cut initial deliveries within the EU from 80 million doses to 31 million doses, due to reduced output from its factories in Europe.
Since then, it has requested the supply of 9 million additional doses to the 27-nation bloc, whose leaders are facing criticism of what is perceived as slow progress in inoculating the population.
Britain has the deadliest coronavirus outbreak in Europe, with more than 108,000 deaths, and is in its third national blockade as authorities try to contain a new, more communicable virus variant first identified in southeastern England.
Other variants are also a concern. Public health officials in England are going door to door, trying to test all adults in eight target communities in an attempt to prevent a new strain first identified in South Africa from spreading further.
So far, 105 cases of the variant have been identified in the UK, 11 of them in people without connections to travel abroad. Scientists say there is no evidence that the South African variant is more serious than the original virus, but it can be more contagious. There are also concerns that current vaccines may be less effective against this variant because it contains a peak protein mutation characteristic of the virus that existing vaccines target.
This is a concern, as the UK runs to vaccinate its own population against the virus. Nearly 10 million people received the first of the two injections, including most people over 80 and those in nursing homes.
Pollard said Oxford scientists believe the AstraZeneca vaccine will continue to offer protection against new variants of COVID-19, although they are still waiting for data on that.
He said that even if the virus adapts “it does not mean that we will not have protection against serious diseases”.
“If we need to update the vaccines, then it is a relatively simple process. It only takes a matter of months, instead of the huge efforts that everyone undertook last year to get the large-scale tests to run, ”he told the BBC.
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