The head of the Oxford University group developing one of the leading Covid vaccine contenders has played down the chances of vaccinating people by Christmas.
“I think there is a small chance of that being possible, but I just don’t know,’’ said Prof Andrew Pollard, the chief investigator of the trial, giving evidence to MPs at a joint hearing of the science and health committees of the House of Commons.
Pollard said it was very difficult to answer the question. The Oxford team, working with pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca, has not yet looked at any results to find out whether it works and will protect people against the virus or prevent them becoming seriously ill.
“I’m optimistic that we could reach that point before the end of this year to do an analysis,” he said. But then they would need to put their data to the regulatory authorities.
“We absolutely need that to happen so there’s very careful scrutiny of everything that’s been done in the clinical trials, to look at their integrity and the quality of the data and to verify that the results are correct,” he said. After that would come the policy decisions about who would get the vaccine and how it would be deployed.
It was possible other vaccines might be approved before the Oxford one, he said, and he hoped there would be lots of successes because multiple vaccines would be needed for the 7 billion people in the world.
Kate Bingham, the head of the UK vaccines taskforce, told the committee “we could be weeks away” from looking at the interim data for both the Oxford/AstraZeneca and the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccines, for which the UK has also agreed a deal.
Manufacturing of the vaccines was well advanced, she said, although she would not disclose how many doses of the Oxford vaccine had already been made. They were scaling up at unprecedented speed, “starting with low numbers of doses – by which I do mean millions of doses, but not tens of millions of doses initially – so that we will end up with 100 million doses that we’ve secured from AZ in the first half of next year”.
Other questions will arise once results are known, Pollard said. The US regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, has said it wanted at least 50% efficacy to approve a vaccine, but if one was found to prevent 40% of cases, policymakers would have to consider whether it would be of help to the NHS.
A good result would be having vaccines with significant efficacy, he said, “whether that’s 50, 60, 70, 80, or whatever the figure is, that is an enormous achievement, it means that there are, from a health system point of view, fewer people with Covid going into hospital. People who develop cancer can have their operations and all their chemotherapy”.
But that would not mean an immediate end to the pandemic. “It is a complete game changer and a success if we meet those efficacy end points, but unfortunately, it doesn’t mean that we can all go back to normal immediately. It takes time to roll out vaccines and not everyone will take them. And we will still have people getting this virus because it’s just too good at transmitting,” he said.
