The World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Monday that it has approved a COVID-19 vaccine developed by pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and Oxford University, a major step forward for both manufacturers and the millions of people who may be able to would be to gain access to protection against the new coronavirus.
According to a statement by the WHO, he approved the vaccine manufactured by the company in the South Korean AstraZeneca-SKBio and the Serum Institute of India.
“We now have all the pieces available for the rapid distribution of vaccines. But we still need to scale up production,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters in a newsletter. “We continue to call on COVID-19 vaccine developers to submit their dossiers to the WHO for review at the same time as they submit them to regulators in high-income countries.”
The AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine had a bumpy road. In September, the company had to address a ‘safety signal’ during phase three testing of its testing, or the phase shortly before a vaccine is released to the public, during which the manufacturers’ results of the first phase on safety and efficacy confirm and expand. Two trials, “according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The company has passed its tests to address a serious neurological event in one of the patients on whom the vaccine was tested. Eventually, no connection between the event and the candidate for vaccination was not, which means that the trial can be resumed.
By November, AstraZeneca and Oxford had made enough progress in developing their vaccine candidate that the prestigious medical journal The Lancet approved an article confirming that the vaccine was safe and elicited a strong immune response in elderly patients. The AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine is cheaper and easier to distribute than many of its competitors, as the mRNA vaccines manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer need to be stored below zero; the AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine can be stored in normal refrigerator temperatures. As a result, the company states that its goal is to distribute 300 million doses of the vaccine to 145 countries, most of which are poorer, by the first half of 2021. Because the vaccine requires two doses, it can take 150 vaccinations. million people.
The WHO also announced that it had convened a panel that believed that the vaccine could also be used in countries with the South African variant of the virus, B.1.351. This is an important development because the South African government suspended the use of the AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine earlier this month because it claims that the vaccine does not protect the volunteers of clinical trials against the mutated virus, which is more contagious.
The AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine is a vaccine introduced by adenovirus, which means that it uses a harmless version of the cold virus that is adapted to be both weak and also contains a gene of the SARS-CoV 2-protein. The vein protein causes the small buds that protrude like the spines on a sea urchin from the spherical center of the coronavirus. AstraZeneca / Oxford’s adenovirus-vaccinated vaccine helps the immune system to recognize that protein and build up antibodies to protect itself against the development of COVID-19. In contrast, mRNA vaccines directly introduce an altered version of a single-stranded RNA molecule that complements one of the DNA strands in a gene in the bodies’ cells. In this way, the cells produce proteins such as those of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that can be recognized by the immune system as a threat and it also helps to build an effective response to protect itself.
Earlier this month, the AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine was approved for all adults in the European Union (EU), but in the United States (US) it was not given the same approval.