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Post by Admin on Feb 3, 2021 20:28:39 GMT
The U.K.’s decision to delay the second shot of the AstraZeneca-University of Oxford coronavirus vaccine has been found to be an effective strategy, according to a new study. Oxford researchers found that the Covid vaccine was 76% effective at preventing symptomatic infection for three months after a single dose, and in fact that the efficacy rate rose with a longer interval between the first and second doses. A delay in the second dose means more people can get their first vaccines sooner because it eases a tight supply. “Vaccine efficacy after a single standard dose of vaccine from day 22 to day 90 post vaccination was 76% ... and modelled analysis indicated that protection did not wane during this initial 3 month period,” the study found. It was published on Tuesday as a preprint and is under review at The Lancet medical journal. The efficacy rate rose to 82.4% when there was at least a 12-week interval before the second dose. When the second dose was given less than six weeks after the first one, the efficacy rate was 54.9%. “These analyses show that higher vaccine efficacy is obtained with a longer interval between the first and second dose, and that a single dose of vaccine is highly efficacious in the first 90 days, providing further support for current policy,” the report said. The U.K.’s current strategy is to vaccinate as many people as possible with a single dose first and to delay the second dose for up to 12 weeks — the idea being that a first dose provides at least some partial protection and allows more people to access the vaccines while they are in limited supply.
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Post by Admin on Feb 14, 2021 20:27:01 GMT
Mexico has received a shipment of 870,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine from India, the government said, as the country prepares to prioritise older adults in the next phase of its vaccination campaign. Mexico is also expecting shipments of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to resume, with 494,000 doses due to arrive on Tuesday, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said during a news conference. Mexico and Argentina have an agreement with AstraZeneca to produce the vaccine for the eventual distribution of 250 million doses in Latin America, with financial support from the foundation of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. Mexico started vaccinating healthcare workers in December but struggled to hit its targets amid global shortages and delays of Pfizer’s vaccine. The country has reported nearly 1.98 million COVID-19 cases and more than 173,000 coronavirus-related deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data. That is the third-highest death toll in the world after the United States and Brazil. Vaccination plan Mexico will next vaccinate adults above 60, a group representing 12 percent of Mexico’s nearly 130 million people, between February and April. “The vaccines are already available … and they will not stop arriving so that the national vaccination plan does not stop,” President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said at the news conference in the southwestern state of Oaxaca. The country has so far received just 1,636,350 vaccine doses, according to government data, but has agreements for millions more, including China’s CanSino and the Russian Sputnik V vaccines. It received the active ingredient for two million doses of the CanSino vaccine on Thursday.
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Post by Admin on Mar 4, 2021 19:42:07 GMT
The U.S. has a long way to go with its coronavirus vaccine distribution, but it's way ahead of most other countries. That includes Germany, where many have chosen to wait for one vaccine over another, instead of just getting the shot that is most available.
The U.S. has 60 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine ready to roll out the moment the FDA authorizes it. As CBS News correspondent Chris Livesay reports, that vaccine is already available in Germany, where COVID-19 cases have been on the rise lately. The hard part has been getting Germans to take it.
At Germany's biggest vaccination center in Hamburg, 35-year-old surgeon Johannes told us he had been eager to get his first shot, so he could stop worrying so much about the risks of potentially carrying the disease from the hospital back home to his partner and their newborn son.
But now that the offer has actually come for a shot of the AstraZeneca vaccine, Johannes admits he's "a little bit afraid."
"I thought I was getting the [Pfizer]-BioNTech vaccine, but now I heard there's the decision that I don't get it," he said. "I was really disappointed."
It's a scene playing out across Europe's most powerful country. Germany has already taken delivery of more than 1.4 million doses of the AstraZeneca drug, and they've been distributed to vaccination centers across the country like the one in Hamburg.
But polling suggests about half of Germans don't want it.
"Vaccine nationalism" threatens Europe's COVID vaccine supplies More broadly, the European Union, which organized the purchase of all vaccine doses collectively for its 27 member states, secured a whopping 400 million doses of the U.K.-developed vaccine.
Clinical trials suggested that the AstraZeneca formula was between 60% and 90% effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 infection — lower than the 95% efficacy that Pfizer/BioNTech reported in their trials.
Then Germany's national vaccine committee refused to approve the AstraZeneca for people over 65 years old, citing a lack of data from the trials proving it worked well on those older individuals.
The backlash was fast, significant, and it even spread outside of Germany to other major European countries, including France, where the vaccine was only recently cleared for use on older people.
Germany on Thursday appeared set to finally reverse course, as the national vaccine committee formally recommended that the government authorize the AstraZeneca shot for use in all adults, including to over-65s, bowing to pressure from senior doctors in the country.
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Post by Admin on Mar 25, 2021 20:22:25 GMT
AstraZeneca insisted that its COVID-19 vaccine provides strong protection even after counting additional illnesses in its U.S. study, as the drugmaker responded to concerns raised by American officials in an unusually public rebuke that threatened to further erode confidence in the shot.
In a late-night news release Wednesday, AstraZeneca said it had analyzed more data from that study and concluded the vaccine is 76% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19, instead of the 79% it had reported earlier in the week.
Some experts called the new analysis reassuring and said the updated details didn’t look substantially different from what was announced earlier. A peek at the full data won’t come for at least another few weeks, once the Food and Drug Administration begins its own stringent review. For now, it’s not clear if the new figures will be sufficient to repair the credibility in a vaccine that, despite being widely used in Britain, Europe and other countries, has had a troubled rollout.
Earlier this week, an independent panel that oversees the U.S. trial of the vaccine had accused AstraZeneca of cherry-picking data to tout the protection offered by its shot. The panel, in a harsh letter to the company and to U.S. health leaders, said AstraZeneca had left out some COVID-19 cases that occurred in the study.
The drugmaker responded that the results it reported included cases up to mid-February, as agreed in the study rules, and that it was preparing a fuller analysis of cases that had occurred since then — which it released Wednesday.
“AstraZeneca may have just been too hasty in submitting the earlier, incomplete interim analysis rather than waiting to analyze and submit the full dataset,” said Julian Tang, a virologist at the University of Leicester who was not connected to the research. He said the updated details were likely solid enough for U.S. regulators to authorize the vaccine.
Before the new results were released, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, told reporters he hoped that when all the data was publicly vetted by the FDA, it would dispel any hesitancy caused by the spat. He predicted it would “turn out to be a good vaccine.”
AstraZeneca had been counting on findings from a predominantly U.S. study of 32,000 people to help rebuild confidence in its shot, which is crucial to global efforts to end the coronavirus pandemic since it is cheap, easy to store and a pillar of the COVAX initiative aimed at bringing vaccines to low- and middle-income countries. Despite evidence from trials and in real-world use that it does protect, previous studies have turned up inconsistent data about the degree of effectiveness.
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Post by Admin on Apr 14, 2021 20:11:54 GMT
Denmark has ceased giving the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine amid concerns about rare cases of blood clots, the first European country to do so fully. The move is expected to delay the country's vaccination programme by several weeks. Drug watchdog the European Medicines Agency last week announced a possible link with clots but said the risk of dying of Covid-19 was much greater. Several European countries had previously briefly suspended the jab. Most have now resumed vaccinations with AstraZeneca, but often with limits to older age groups. On Tuesday, the US, Canada and the European Union paused the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for similar reasons over clotting. South Africa has also paused its use, despite the Johnson & Johnson being its preferred vaccine because of its effectiveness against the South African variant. For both AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, the blood clot side effects are extremely rare.
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