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Results of those trials should definitely be known by Christmas, the Oxford Vaccine Group’s director, Andrew Pollard, said, adding it was too early to know whether and how well the vaccine works in preventing COVID-19 disease.
“We’re still waiting to get to the point where we can do the analysis to just work out how well the vaccine can protect people, and we’re getting ever closer to that,” he told journalists.
“We are optimistic that we’ll be able to do that before Christmas, and obviously we’ll share that with you as soon as we can at that point.”
The Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine candidate, called AZD1222 or ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, had been among the front-runners in global efforts to develop shots to protect against infection with the novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2.
But rival drugmakers Pfizer Inc, BioNTech and Moderna Inc have in the past 10 days edged ahead, releasing data from late-stage COVID-19 vaccine trials that shows more than 90% efficacy.
“We’re not in a rush. We and it’s not a competition with the other developers,” Oxford’s Pollard said, adding that AstraZeneca would release headline efficacy data before it was published in an academic journal.
Oxford University has set a target of 53 infections to start the interim analysis of its late-stage trial results, though “lots of cases” in its trial arms in Britain, South Africa and Brazil mean the exact number of infections reported could differ.
Unlike the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots, both of which use new technology known as messenger RNA (mRNA), AstraZeneca’s is a viral vector vaccine made from a weakened version of a common cold virus found in chimpanzees.
