The vaccine for Wuhan pneumonia (novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19), developed by the pharmaceutical company Astellicom (AZ) in collaboration with Oxford University, has been underestimated because the initial clinical data is inferior to that of the vaccine developed by the German biotech company BioNTech and the American Pfizer Pharmaceuticals (Pfizer). The new study confirms that the AZ vaccine is more effective than the BNT vaccine in reducing the risk of hospital admission for patients over 70 years old, shattering doubts that the AZ vaccine is useless for the elderly.
The AZ vaccine has been repeatedly rumored to be less effective in protecting people over 65 years of age, so many countries have banned the AZ vaccine for people over 65 years of age. However. However, according to the UK Mail on Sunday, although the AZ vaccine has a clinical trial protection rate of about 70%, which is not as high as the 95% of the BNT vaccine, the UK health department’s follow-up study shows that both have the ability to prevent serious hospital admissions of more than 90%, which is comparable, and the former even performs better in the group of elderly people.
In addition, studies in the UK have also shown that just one dose of AZ vaccine maintains 76% effectiveness in preventing infection over a period of 2 weeks to 3 months. As more safety data becomes available, and as the AZ vaccine is gradually unblocked following mass vaccination in the UK, Germany has acknowledged that its previous decision to exclude people over 65 from receiving the AZ vaccine was wrong and is working to revise the guidelines.
The statistics from the 2 vaccinations combined, the UK has seen a 40% reduction in the number of elderly people over the age of 75 who died from martial lung in the past week, and the number of cases of people over the age of 85 who had to receive intensive care treatment for the disease has dropped to near zero. A study in England, cited by the newspaper, found that the risk of hospital admission after infection was also lower among elderly people aged 70 and older who had received the AZ vaccine than among the same age group who had received the BNT vaccine.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recommended last month that the use of the AZ vaccine be supported, and stressed that people of all ages can be vaccinated, including those over 65 years old.
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