LONDON (AP) – Britain on Wednesday authorized the emergency use of a second COVID-19 vaccine, becoming the first country to green light an easier-to-use injection that its developers hope will become the first. “Vaccine for the world.”
The Department of Health indicated that it had accepted the recommendation of the Regulatory Agency for Medicines and Medical Products to authorize the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and the British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.
Britain has purchased 100 million doses of the vaccine and plans to start its administration in the next few days. Hundreds of thousands of people in the UK have already received a different vaccine, developed by the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German ally BioNTech.
AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said “today is an important day for millions of people in the UK who will have access to this new vaccine. It has been shown to be effective, well tolerated and easier to administer, and is supplied by AstraZeneca on a non-profit basis. “
“We would like to thank our colleagues at AstraZeneca, the University of Oxford, the British government and the tens of thousands of clinical trial participants,” he added.
The partial results of the studies in almost 24,000 people in Great Britain, Brazil and South Africa suggest that the injection is safe and has an effectiveness of around 70% in preventing illness from a coronavirus infection.
The effectiveness is not as high as that of other potential vaccines, but Soriot recently told the Sunday Times that he was confident that the vaccine will show that it is as effective as that of competing companies.
Coronavirus vaccines have typically been given in two doses, an initial injection and a booster given about three weeks later.
But the British government said that with the AstraZeneca vaccine the priority would be to give a single dose to as many people as possible, which is believed to offer enormous protection against the virus. He indicated that the highest-risk population would be injected first, and that everyone would receive a second dose about 12 weeks after the initial injection.
“The campaign will start on January 4 and it will really accelerate in the first weeks of next year,” Britain’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock told Sky News.
Several countries are expected to depend on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine due to its low cost, availability and ease of use. It can be kept in refrigerators instead of the deep freezers that other vaccines usually require. The company has said it will sell each dose for $ 2.50 and plans to make about 3 billion doses before the end of 2021.
“We have a vaccine for the world,” said one of the study leaders, Dr Andrew Pollard of the University of Oxford.
