Courtesy Times (UK)

Oxford jab expected to win approval ‘in days’

The coronavirus vaccine developed by Oxford University and Astra Zeneca is expected to win approval this week as the head of the drugs giant said it should be” effective against the highly transmissible new strain of the virus.

Senior government officials expect the drugs watchdog to give the green light before Thursday, speeding up the provision of the jab to the 15m people who could end up in hospital if they caught the virus.

Astra Zeneca’s chief executive, Pascal Soriot, today reveals that new data will show the vaccine is as effective as the Pfizer and Moderna jabs that have already been approved, protecting 95% of patients, and is 100% effective” in preventing severe illness requiring hospital treatment.

Approval for the drug cannot come soon enough. Case numbers rose by 57% last week and the spread of the new strain threatens on several fronts:

● Millions more people are set to be put into tier 4 and told to stay at home” when the tiers are reviewed on Wednesday after a loosening of the rules over Christmas.

● Health chiefs warned the number of Covid patients in hospital will overtake the first-wave peak of 21,683 by the end of the year.

● In Wales, the Cardiff and Vale University Health Board is calling for assistance from medical students or other staff groups who have previously supported with proning patients” in intensive care units. Proning is the process where people are turned onto their front to increase the flow of oxygen to the lungs.

● Hospitals have been ordered to mobilise all their surge capacity”. Some have begun setting up makeshift intensive care beds in paediatric and cancer wards.

● Dozens of hospital trusts are projected to have a third or half of their beds filled with Covid patients by New Year’s Eve. One senior NHS source said the service now had the equivalent of 40 hospitals full of infected patients. A senior government official said the new strain of Covid had overtaken the old and was running rampant” in the UK.

The latest figures are not good, but the guidance is the MHRA [the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency] will give the Oxford vaccine the go-ahead by midweek.”

The source added: The first priority is to vaccinate the 12 to 15 million people who would need hospitalisation if they caught Covid. Approval for the Astra Zeneca vaccine would mean we are well on course to do that by the spring.”

On the prospective rollout of the vaccine from January 4, a health department spokesman said the MHRA must be given time to carry out its review of the data of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.

It is understood that teachers will be high on the list for vaccinations — just below NHS staff and the elderly — as the government strives to fulfil its promise to reopen schools to all pupils in the New Year. Official statistics show that secondary-school pupils had the highest rate of infection of any age group just before schools broke up for the Christmas holidays.

Officials are also considering a single shot” programme for young people, as the former prime minister Tony Blair suggested last week. The theory is that stimulating some immunity among twice as many people, and following up with a booster dose as new supplies arrived, might do more to stem the spread of the virus.

The government has always regarded the Oxford vaccine as the one that would transform the battle against Covid, since it can be stored in a fridge and costs as little as £2 a shot. The Pfizer drug has to be kept at temperatures of minus 70C and costs £15 a dose.

In the first trials of the Oxford vaccine, it was found to be 62% effective overall, though one group accidentally given a half-dose first was 90% protected. The Pfizer-BioNTech drug is 95% effective and Moderna’s vaccine 94.5%.

We think we have figured out the winning formula and how to get efficacy that, after two doses, is up there with everybody else,” said Soriot.

The imminent threat of hospitals running out of beds was laid bare in a leaked letter sent to regional NHS bosses. In the six-page memo, the NHS’s chief operating officer, Amanda Pritchard, revealed admissions were rising in almost all parts of the country”.

Pritchard ordered NHS trusts to mobilise all of their available surge capacity over the coming weeks”, to include maximising use of the independent sector” and Nightingale hospitals.

But there were questions about staff shortage. Thousands of NHS medics and workers were absent last week, infected or self-isolating.

In a second leaked memo, the NHS medical director, Steve Powis, ordered hospitals to be put on high alert over the new variant and the South African strain.

Setting out immediate actions” to be taken on Christmas Eve, Powis demanded hospitals ratchet up infection control policies.

Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents hospital trusts, warned: We are now embarking on the most testing time in the history of the health service.”