FRANKFURT (Reuters) – AstraZeneca on Monday denied that the COVID-19 vaccine is not very effective for people over 65, after German media reports said officials fear the vaccine could not be approved in the European Union for use in the elderly not.
German daily newspapers Handelsblatt and Bild said in separate reports that the vaccine – developed jointly by AstraZeneca and Oxford University – had 8% or less than 10% in those over 65, respectively.
German officials were concerned that the vaccine might not be approved by the EU Medicines Agency EMA for those over 65, Bild said in its online edition.
The reports point to another possible problem for AstraZeneca, which told the EU on Friday that it could not meet the agreed supply target until the end of March, after having problems with vaccine production.
Frustration has already increased among European countries as Pfizer and BioNTech, a partner, announced a temporary slowdown in vaccine stocks earlier in January.
In a written response, AstraZeneca described the German media reports that the COVID-19 vaccine appears to have a very low efficacy in the elderly as “completely wrong”.
It said Britain’s joint committee on vaccination and immunization supported the use of the vaccine in the elderly. It also said that a strong immune response to the vaccine was shown in blood analysis of participants in elderly trials.
Britain became the first country to approve the vaccine with two shots on December 30 and did not set a higher age limit. It has so far focused on the elderly and health workers for its vaccination campaign.
AstraZeneca’s main trial in Britain began with the testing of adults under the age of 55, as it was initially focused on healthcare staff and frontline workers.
Participants in elderly trials were later recruited so that infections, which are necessary to obtain reliable efficacy data, also enter later.
Researchers at the University of Oxford said in an article published in the medical journal The Lancet on December 8, when the details of the most important vaccination trials in Britain and Brazil were revealed, that the effectiveness data based on infections in the elderly were still is limited.
“The efficacy data in these groups are currently limited by the small number of cases (infection), but additional data will be available in future analyzes,” they said in the newspaper.
Reporting by Ludwig Burger and Edward Taylor; edited by Richard Pullin