Geneva: After the World Health Organisation’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety concluded last Friday that the available data do not suggest any overall increase in clotting conditions following administration of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, AstraZeneca last night (IST) announced positive results from a trial of the vaccine among more than 32 thousand people in Chile, Peru and the United States.
The vaccine was 79% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 and 100% effective in preventing hospitalization and death. No safety concerns were reported, the WHO stated.
“These data are further evidence that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is safe and effective,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters here.
So far, AstraZeneca is the only company that has committed to not profiting from its COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic. It’s the only vaccine developer that has made a significant contribution to vaccine equity, by licensing its technology to several other companies, including SK Bio in the Republic of Korea and the Serum Institute of India, which are producing more than 90% of the vaccines that have so far been distributed through COVAX.
“We need more vaccine producers to follow this example and license their technology to other companies,” Dr. Ghebreyesus said, pointing out that a year ago, Costa Rica and WHO had launched the mechanism to do this, the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool, or C-TAP, which promotes an open-science model, where licensing would occur in a non-exclusive, transparent manner to leverage as much manufacturing capacity as possible.
However, so far, C-TAP remains a highly promising but under-utilized tool, he lamented.
Dr. Ghebreyesus further informed that on Friday, WHO had hosted a meeting of more than 800 experts on enhancing genomic sequencing of the SARS-CoV-2 virus globally, to improve the monitoring of its evolution.
“Knowing when, how and where the virus is evolving is vital information,” he said but categorically stated that it was of limited use if countries do not work together to suppress transmission everywhere at the same time.
“If countries won’t share vaccines for the right reasons, we appeal to them to do it out of self-interest,” he said, adding that the gap between the number of vaccines administered in rich countries, and the number of vaccines administered through COVAX is growing every day, and becoming more grotesque every day.
Some countries are racing to vaccinate their entire populations while other countries have nothing. This may buy short-term security, but it’s a false sense of security. The inequitable distribution of vaccines is not just a moral outrage. It’s also economically and epidemiologically self-defeating.
“The more transmission, the more variants. And the more variants that emerge, the more likely it is that they will evade vaccines,” Dr. Ghebreyesus warned. He stressed that as long as the virus continues to circulate anywhere, people will continue to die, trade and travel will continue to be disrupted, and the economic recovery will be further delayed.
The WHO further warned countries that are now vaccinating younger, healthy people at low risk of disease are doing so at the cost of the lives of health workers, older people and other at-risk groups in other countries.
– global bihari bureau
