You may rightly say that all this sounds a bit woolly, and it kind of is. Here’s what we know: the vaccine, if administered correctly, probably works about 90% of the time on symptomatic cases, but we can’t be all that sure; it has some effect on asymptomatic cases, but we don’t know what; and no one who took it ended up in hospital, although we don’t know yet whether that means everyone just had a mild case of the sniffles or something more. It’s all good news, but very vague good news.
So here are some bits of good news that are not vague. First, several million doses of this vaccine — which, as we’ve seen, definitely works, by the targets set — have already been made, and there is lots and lots more on the way. According to Pam Cheng of AstraZeneca (again speaking on the SMC briefing), by the end of December there will be enough actual vaccine to make about 20 million doses for the UK alone, of which about 4 million will already be in vials, ready to go. She thinks there will be about 200 million doses’ worth of material ready worldwide by the same time.
By the end of the first quarter of next year — so the beginning of April — she says there will be enough material for about 700 million doses worldwide, and about 40 million doses ready to go in the UK. And by the end of the year, they expect to have made 3 billion doses. The Serum Institute in India, the world’s biggest vaccine manufacturer, has a licence to manufacture it, so that’s a plausible number. Ewer said that it is estimated that something like two-thirds of the world’s children have received a vaccine made by the Serum Institute: “They are manufacturing on an enormous scale,” she said. “This is exactly what they specialise in, and that’s why we worked so hard to get them on board, because they can do large-scale cheap manufacture.”
Better still, if the half-dose/full-dose regimen gets licensed, then that means it takes 25% less vaccine per patient. So your 40 million doses would vaccinate about 26 million Britons, instead of 20 million. Your 3 billion doses at the end of 2020 would vaccinate 2 billion people worldwide, not 1.5 billion.
That’s nowhere near enough for herd immunity, especially if the efficacy is on the lower end of the estimate, but it’s enough to vaccinate a huge chunk of at-risk groups and essential workers such as healthcare staff. And AstraZeneca and the manufacturers it has licensed the vaccine to will continue to churn out hundreds of millions more a month.
On top of this the Oxford vaccine, as has been widely reported, can be stored at normal fridge temperatures — between 2° and 8°C. It’s not that it would have been impossible to get huge amounts of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines to, say, rural Malawi, with their -20°C and -80°C storage requirements, but it will be a damn sight easier with this one.
And, perhaps best of all, the Oxford vaccine looks as though it will sell at something like £2-3 a dose, according to Ewer. Pfizer is expected to sell its vaccine at about £15 and Moderna at more like £25. It is simply much more plausible that this can be bought and distributed in the large numbers required for use in the developing world. This is, says Ewer, partly because the viral vector vaccine technology is older – Johnson & Johnson has one for Ebola which is already being used — so “all the background work on deployment has been done”, while the mRNA vaccines are entirely novel (if exciting).
I don’t know what this will mean for Britain in the short term. I was speaking recently to a senior scientist who helps advise the government about the mass testing that’s been piloted in Liverpool, and he mentioned that one possibility is that people who test positive have to isolate for a week, but then get a six-month passport saying they’ve had the disease and are safe. He suggested that the same system could be used for vaccines; it sounds plausible to me, with caveats, but whether it actually happens is anyone’s guess.
But the takeaway is that this, like the Pfizer and Moderna announcements in previous weeks, is fantastic news. More vaccines will come, and may be better in various ways, but this is a mass-availability, cheap, effective, easily-stored candidate that does everything you want. It will form the backbone of Britain’s response, and the world’s, and I’m really excited by it.
Now, I just can’t wait to find out what we get next Vaccine Candidate Announcement Day. See you next Monday!
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