Chief nurse Sam Foster will hold a vial of the Oxford University / AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine at Churchill Hospital in Oxford, southwest England on January 4, 2021.
Steve Parsons | AFP | Getty Images
LONDON – The coronavirus vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University has been approved by the European drug regulator, the European Pharmaceutical Agency.
The vaccine is already in use in the UK, after being approved in late December, and now makes up the majority of jobs provided in the country, along with the image Pfizer-BioNTech, already approved for use in the EU.
The agreement comes at a difficult time for the EU, with its vaccination program slow at best, and looking particularly vulnerable to a shortage of supply.
It has been dealt with two blows in the past few weeks, first from Pfizer, which said it would reduce production over time while updating its production capacity at its Belgian plant. Then last Friday it was reported that AstraZeneca would deliver far fewer doses to the block in the spring than originally expected, due to production issues at its plants in the Netherlands and Belgium.
The delay has sparked a crisis in the EU, which has said it could block the export of coronavirus vaccines from the bloc in a bid to prioritize its citizens.
On Wednesday, the EU called on AstraZeneca to fulfill its agreement to deliver millions of coronavirus vaccines by any means necessary, recommending that the company divert some supplies from its production facilities. in the UK to the EU.
Then on Thursday, doubts were poured out about the possible approval of the AstraZeneca vaccine after the German vaccination committee said they were proposing that the vaccine should only be offered to people aged 18- 64.
This, he said, was because there was not enough data to assess the effectiveness of people over 65.
Elderly trial participants were later admitted to phase three clinical trials of the AstraZeneca strain, which occurred in the UK and Brazil, and earlier in South Africa, so there is less data available on its effectiveness in those over 65.
AstraZeneca said this data would come when it published its test results in the medical journal The Lancet in December: “As older age groups have been recruited longer than younger age groups, there has been less time exists to collect cases and as a result, efficacy data in these numbers are currently limited by the small number of cases, but additional data will be available in future analyzes, ” he said.