British pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca claimed to have found, after further research, “the winning formula” for its COVID-19 vaccine developed with the University of Oxford, on which the British regulator must rule in the coming days. In an interview, CEO Pascal Soriot was upset with critics from the barrier: “I am an actor [en la carrera por conseguir la vacuna], not an observer or a commentator,” he said.
“We believe we have found the winning formula and how to achieve effectiveness that, at two doses, is high like the others,” Soriot told the Sunday Times, adding that his vaccine ensured “100% protection” against severe forms of COVID-19. Soriot was also confident that the vaccine will be effective against the new strain of the virus detected in Britain: “we think for the time being that the vaccine should remain effective,” he said, “but we can’t be sure, so we’ll do some testing.”
In the interim results of large-scale clinical trials in the UK and Brazil, the BRITISH laboratory announced in November that its vaccine had an average efficacy of 70% compared to more than 90% of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. Behind this average result lie large differences between two different protocols: efficacy is 90% for volunteers who received first half the dose, then a full dose a month later, but only 62% for another group vaccinated with two full doses.
These results were criticized because there was an error in the injection of half a dose, although a relatively small group had followed this protocol. The company then announced that its vaccine required an “additional study.”
