Britain on Wednesday authorized the emergency use of a second vaccine against COVID-19, becoming the first country to give the green light to an injection for easier use and which its developers hope will become in the “vaccine for the world.”
The Department of Health indicated that it had accepted the recommendation of the Medicines and Medical Devices Regulatory Agency to authorize the vaccine developed by Oxford University and the British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.
Britain has acquired 100 million doses of the vaccine and plans to start its administration in the coming 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 proven to be effective, well tolerated and easier to administer, and is provided by AstraZeneca non-profit “.
“We would like to thank our colleagues at AstraZeneca, Oxford University, the British government and the tens of thousands of participants in the clinical trials,” he added.
Partial results from studies in nearly 24,000 people in Britain, Brazil and South Africa suggest that the injection is safe and has an effectiveness of around 70% in preventing disease from a coronavirus infection.
The effectiveness is not as high as that of other possible vaccines, but Soriot recently told the Sunday Times that he was confident the vaccine would prove to be as effective as that of competing companies.
Coronavirus vaccines have usually 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 administer a single dose to as many people as possible, which is believed to offer enormous protection against viruses. He indicated that he would first be injected into the population at greatest risk, and that they would all receive a second dose about 12 weeks after the initial injection.
“The campaign will start on January 4 and will really accelerate in the first weeks of that year,” Britain’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock said in statements to Sky News.
Several countries are expected to depend on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine because of its low cost, availability and ease of use. It can be kept in refrigerators instead of ultra freezers which usually require other vaccines. The company has said it will sell each dose for $ 2.50 and plans to manufacture about 3 billion doses before the end of 2021.
“We have a vaccine for the world,” said one of the study’s leaders, Dr Andrew Pollard, of Oxford University.