After Pfizer/BioNTech, is AstraZeneca Covid vaccine safe and effective as well? This is what medical journal The Lancet says on Tuesday December 8, 2020, releasing results from an assessment of the safety data reviewed by an independent group of peers, also confirming the vaccine is about 70% effective, in accordance with what the laboratory announced back to November 23.
This is the very first vaccine to have been submitted to a scientific review and approved by it, a standard process generally approving vaccines, the other laboratories preferred skipping this step and seek approval to health and medicines agencies in each country that received an application for issuance.
As for safety data, they come from over 23,000 volunteers listed in several clinical trials in the United-Kingdom, in South Africa and Brazil, put together to be easily accessible by the scientific community. As for side effects, good news as well: in all participants to the trials, only one patient – who has been injected a dose of the vaccine – has developed “possibly-related severe side effects” to the produce injected. As reported by The Lancet, it was a case of transverse myelitis (a rare neurological injury) that forced the laboratory to halt trials for a while to invest.
Two other patients have also developed severe side effects, one in the control group that has been given placebo, the other “in a participant still masked to group allocation”. It “resulted in temporarily pausing the trial and all participants have recovered or are recovering”, the report reads. “We have begun submitting data to regulatory authorities around the world for early approval and our global supply chains are up and running” AstraZeneca Chief Executive Officer Pascal Soriot explains.
For the record, two other vaccines are also being studied for issuance: Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and Moderna Therapeutics vaccine.
