FRANKFURT (Reuters) – AstraZeneca denied Monday its COVID-19 vaccine is not very effective for people over 65, after German media reports said officials fear the vaccine may not be approved in the Union For use in the elderly.
The German newspapers Handelsblatt and Bild said in separate reports that the vaccine – developed in collaboration with AstraZeneca and Oxford University – had an effectiveness of 8% or less than 10%, respectively, in those over 65 years of age.
German officials have been concerned that the vaccine may not receive approval from the EU EMA drug authority for use in people over 65, Bild said in its online edition.
The reports mark another potential problem for AstraZeneca, which said on Friday the EU could not meet agreed supply targets by the end of March after encountering vaccine production problems.
Frustration has already increased among European countries, as Pfizer and partner BioNTech announced a temporary slowdown in vaccine supply in early January.
In a written response, AstraZeneca described German media reports as saying that its COVID-19 vaccine had been shown to have a very low effectiveness in the elderly as “completely incorrect”.
The British Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization has supported the use of the vaccine in the elderly. He also said that a strong immune response to the vaccine was demonstrated in the blood tests of participants in the elderly.
The United Kingdom, on December 30, became the first country to approve the two-shot vaccine and did not impose an upper age limit. So far, he has focused on the elderly and health workers for his immunization campaign.
AstraZeneca’s main trial in the UK began testing adults under the age of 55, as it initially focused on medical staff and front-line workers on active duty.
Participants in the elderly were recruited later, so that infections, which are necessary to reach reliable efficacy data, also came later.
Researchers at Oxford University said in a paper published in The Lancet on December 8, when details of key vaccine studies in the UK and Brazil were published, that data on the effectiveness of infections in the elderly were still limited. .
“Data on the effectiveness of these cohorts are currently limited by the small number of cases (of infection), but additional data will be available in future analyzes,” they said in the paper.
Reporting by Ludwig Burger and Edward Taylor; edited by Richard Pullin