European countries urged to ‘get on’ with Oxford vaccine rollout
New data reaffirming the effectiveness of the Oxford vaccine should encourage European countries to start offering the jab to their elderly populations, a member of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has said.
A new study led by Adam Finn, professor of paediatrics at the University of Bristol, has shown that a single dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine offers “remarkable” levels of protection against severe disease, hospitalisation and death from Covid-19 for people aged 80 and over.
Separate research from Public Health Scotland (PHS) has similarly shown that the jabs are reducing infections and the number of deaths among the elderly and driving down their rates of admittance to hospital.
While the UK’s medicines regulator approved the Oxford vaccine for use in all adults, some countries in Europe initially said the jab was not suitable for the over-65s, citing a lack of data concerning its effectiveness in this age group.
France has since granted the vaccine the green light, though Germany has yet to follow suit. Both countries are struggling to administer doses at pace amid widespread scepticism surrounding the jab.
In light of the study’s findings, which have yet to be peer-reviewed, Prof Finn, who advises the UK government as a JCVI member, called on other countries to use up their stocks of the Oxford vaccine.
He told a press briefing on Wednesday: “The UK is well forward, this age group have been immunised now, we're down into people in their sixties, we've achieved 90 per cent uptake.
“In the short term, the job’s done in the UK.”
He added: “But there are lots of doses of AstraZeneca vaccine available in European countries, and they are not being given to people over the age of 65, in some cases in countries over the age of 55, for lack of data.
“Well, here are the data. There are data from Public Health England (PHE) and Scotland and now from us, showing that you can save lives in elderly people by giving them a dose of AstraZeneca vaccine.
“And those countries need to get on and start doing that as fast as possible.”
The new study led by Prof Finn, called AvonCAP, involved elderly adults with pneumonia or acute respiratory infections admitted to University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust (UHBW) and North Bristol NHS Trust (NBT).
It included 466 adults over 80, of whom 90 per cent would have been regarded as frail.
The findings showed that one dose of Pfizer was 79.3 per cent effective from 14 days after inoculation at preventing illness severe enough to require hospital admission, even in people with multiple health problems.
Meanwhile, a single dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was shown to be 80.4 per cent effective against the same level of illness in the same group, also from 14 days after vaccination.
However, Prof Finn urged against fixating on the percentage rates – which have wide margins of error – or drawing comparisons between the two vaccines.
The Bristol findings support figures from other studies, including those run by PHE and PHS, which looked at whole populations.
The PHE study found that both jabs reduced the chance of needing hospital treatment by more than 80 per cent among the over-80s.
“I think what this does is provide confidence in the results overall,” Prof Finn said. “I think their results confirm ours and our results confirm theirs.”
He said he expects the effectiveness to be even higher in younger age groups.
Although the AvonCAP study differed in its approach, in focusing exclusively on the elderly and frail, this allowed the researchers to look in more detail at patients’ records, including how long after having symptoms they were admitted to hospital and whether they had received a vaccine dose.
The research will continue for another two years to monitor the effectiveness of the vaccine on different groups.
Dr Catherine Hyams, a research fellow in respiratory medicine at the University of Bristol, said the team hoped to identify specific factors that “make people at increased risk of not responding well to these vaccines”.
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