researchers have confirmed that the
oxford
astrazeneca covid vaccine is safe and
effective giving good protection
the paper assessed by independent
scientists sets out full results
from advanced trials of over 20 000
people and it's been published in the
lancet
journal regulators who will have seen
the same data are considering the jab
for emergency use our health reporter
philippa roxby is here with me now and
um just explain then philippa why this
is a significant development in the
whole story of the oxford vaccine
yeah i mean we heard uh a bit last month
about some of the recent data from the
phase three trials of this oxford
astrazeneca vaccine and now they've
actually been published so the full data
has been made available to us and it
confirms what we knew
that this this vaccine is safe and
effective it protects against
illness in 70 percent of people
and there were no hospitalizations or
severe disease from covert 19.
so this backs up what we thought we knew
and this is important to the uk
because the uk has ordered 100 million
doses of this vaccine
and it's hoping it's going to get
through the approval process quite
quickly in the coming weeks
all this data is with the uk regulator
right now the mhra
and they will be analyzing it very
carefully there's a couple of things we
didn't know
which is that most of the participants
in this big study of 23
000 people were under the age of 55 so
at the moment they don't have quite
enough data to say
how well it works in older age groups
but that's something they'll be able to
build up
over time but they do know that the
immune response in older age groups
did look to be good in earlier stages of
the trial so they're quite confident
that it will work well in older age
groups there's also hint that this
vaccine could reduce
transmission of the disease and that's
something that was hinted before
and it's potentially again appears in
this data but it's still too early to
say for definite
they also don't yet know how long the
protection from this vaccine will last
for
but that's something they can analyze
over time is there any idea yet
how long it will take before we get full
regulation then of the oxford vaccine
we hope it's going to be in the coming
weeks the oxford researchers said today
that they hope it will be
soon uh before christmas and of course
that will add to the pfizer vaccine
which is already being rolled out today
and give the uk and and most of the
world a choice of vaccines
which is only going to help to end the
pandemic in the long run
philippa thank you very much indeed
thanks