In a statement, the UK government said that the Regulatory Agency (Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency – MHRA) had approved Oxford / AstraZeneca University’s Covid-19 vaccine after rigorous clinical trials and a thorough analysis of the data by experts of the MHRA ‘.
The vaccine has ‘met strict requirements of safety, quality and efficacy’, the statement said.
“The NHS has a clear plan for the delivery of vaccines and decades of experience in delivering large-scale vaccination programs. It has already vaccinated hundreds of thousands of patients with the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine and will continue to implement it. Now the NHS will begin to their extensive vaccination to put preparations into action to introduce the University of Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine. ‘
“Excitingly, we have found that one of our dosing regimens can be about 90% effective and if this dosing regimen is used, more people can be vaccinated with the planned vaccine supply,” said Andrew Pollard, lead researcher on the Oxford vaccine trial.
The vaccine – developed at Oxford University in England – is significantly cheaper than the others, and it is important that it is much easier to transport and distribute in developing countries than its competitors, as it does not have to be stored at freezing temperatures. does not become.
“I think it’s the only vaccine that can be used in that area at the moment,” Azra Ghani, chair of epidemiology of infectious diseases at Imperial College London, told CNN.
The Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine can be kept for at least six months at refrigerator temperatures of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius (36 to 46 degrees Fahrenheit). The Moderna vaccine should be stored at minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit) – or at refrigerator temperatures for up to 30 days – and the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine should be stored at minus 75 degrees Celsius (minus 103 degrees Fahrenheit), and used within five days of being refrigerated at higher temperatures.
“Pfizer and Moderna need freezer storage, and that’s just the way it is in many institutions,” Ghani said.
‘Cold chain’ refrigeration is the standard storage used worldwide to deliver vaccines from central locations to local health clinics. AstraZeneca’s vaccine is so far ‘the only one that can definitely be delivered to those systems’, Ghani added.
The vaccines are based on different technologies. AstraZeneca’s offering – like the vaccine from Johnson & Johnson and the Russian Sputnik V – uses an adenovirus to carry genetic fragments of coronavirus into the body.