AstraZeneca Corona 19 Vaccine. /Photo = Reuters
The head of the clinical trial directly refuted the claim that the novel coronavirus infection (Corona 19) vaccine developed jointly by Oxford University in England and the multinational pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca is useless for the elderly.
Andrew Pollard, a professor at Oxford University who led the AstraZeneca vaccine clinical trial, appeared on BBC Radio on the 3rd (local time) and said, “(In clinical trials) the elderly showed a very similar immune response to younger adults.”
“The tendency of the protective effect among clinical trial participants was the same, and that was similar,” he added. “The AstraZeneca vaccine elicits an excellent immune response even in the elderly.”
Earlier, the University of Oxford published a thesis that analyzed the results of clinical trials conducted on 17,000 adults aged 18 to 55 in the UK, Brazil, and South Africa the night before.
According to the paper, the AstraZeneca vaccine showed a protective effect from the 22nd day after the first vaccination and maintained the effect at 76% level until 90 days. After the second vaccination after 12 weeks, the effect rose to 82.4%.
The AstraZeneca vaccine was recently controversial that it was useless for the elderly, and Germany, France, and Belgium recommended that the vaccine should only be given under the age of 65.
However, on the 29th of last month, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) recommended conditional marketing approval for those over the age of 18, and did not place any restrictions on the elderly.
Bobae Lee, guest reporter at Hankyung.com [email protected]
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