We will give two billion doses by end of the year
After a pandemic which has tested AstraZeneca to the limit, boss Pascal Soriot plots way forward to post-virus world
Pascal soriot has had a bruising time since the start of the pandemic. The visionary chief executive of astraZeneca has helped save tens of thousands of British and overseas lives with the rapid roll-out of the Oxford covid-19 vaccine.
In contrast to more mercenary rivals at Pfizer and Moderna, the UK pharma group has supplied the jab to the NHs and overseas customers at close to cost.
Yet for all aZ’s efforts to benefit humanity, soriot has been vilified in Europe and found his company on the wrong side of vaccine nationalism in the United states. In spite of the setbacks and legal challenges in the EU, the French chief executive is unfazed.
‘We are in discussions with the EU to ensure a settlement and want to move on,’ he says. ‘Despite all this criticism we are the second largest supplier of vaccine to Europe.’
In the Us, astra has never received the emergency approvals bestowed on the big three american vaccine providers Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson. soriot notes wryly that in the banking crisis of a decade ago, the Us ‘defended its banks very aggressively’. ‘america First’, former President Trump’s slogan, might well explain the hold-ups that aZ confronted in winning fast-track approval in Washington.
soriot has now decided to forget the hold-up and go for full approval. aZ will offer Us regulators ‘tens of thousands of pages of data’ from studies in the Us, south africa, Japan, India and elsewhere, demonstrating the OxfordaZ vaccine’s efficacy and safety.
In an interview from aZ’s continental hub in Zurich, soriot, 62, is relaxed in sports jacket and openneck shirt. He is proud that from a standing start, aZ, with limited vaccine history, has managed to produce and distribute 1bn doses and is promising at least 1bn more before it thinks about charging a market-driven price.
He says: ‘We went into this with our eyes wide open knowing what we were doing. That enabled us to deliver so many doses to a lot of countries. some 60pc of the data [on how the vaccine has worked on individuals] is going to be recovered, which is very rare and we are very excited by it. We think we will get in excess of 2bn doses this year.’
HE aDDs that all that aZ has done was for ‘humanitarian reasons’ and in spite of its success he and his team have not yet decided whether they want to do more in the vaccine business long term.
What is clear from recently published financial results is the revenue and profits sacrifice that astraZeneca and its Oxford partners have made.
Pfizer has projected income of £21.4bn over the full year for its vaccine and last month raised the price to countries buying booster shots. In contrast, in the second quarter of the year aZ reported a modest £643m revenue from its vaccine sales.
soriot has based himself in Zurich for the time being because the highly regulated Heathrow-Us air corridor makes it difficult to travel to america’s east coast. Earlier this year, the aZ chief found himself under fire for spending months at his family home in sydney while controversy was swirling around the efficacy of the vaccine and deliveries. The astra chief is unrepentant. ‘I wanted to be there [in australia] for christmas. I didn’t see my family for ten months and now I am not sure when I will see them again. The pandemic is raging in australia. I’m not sure when they are going to re-open the border.’
Now that the controversy has faded, soriot, a scientist by training, delights in quoting from studies of vaccine efficacy which undermine European and american scepticism.
The monumental amount of data is very encouraging, he says: ‘It shows the vaccine is safe and has great effectiveness.’
He points to a spanish study just published in the lancet, funded by the European Medicines agency, which shows that the americans also have a rare sideeffect danger with their vaccines, and the outcomes are very similar. He says: ‘The most important pieces of information [from all the vaccines] are about what is the long term effect on your heart.’ It’s very rare, but patients need to watch symptoms and get platelets measured if they develop headaches, which could indicate that a medical check is needed. The good news for those who have received the astra jab, based on traditional vaccine science, is that it may well be better at protecting against infection over the longer term than the Pfizer and Moderna shots. studies suggest that there is a slight decline in the efficacy of Pfizer over six months, hence the need for a booster programme. soriot is hopeful that the aZ immunisation provides longer term protection. studies from a similar vaccine used to tackle the Zika virus show that the so called T-cells kick in and ‘provide years of protection’. These results are echoed by a study at Birmingham University which soriot says ‘shows our vaccine stimulates T-cells more’. He expects to have full data on this by October/November, when large numbers of people in the UK and elsewhere will have been double vaccinated for six months. But the early results are promising. What the pandemic has done is focus attention in the UK and on overseas markets on the rise and rise of aZ under soriot’s tutelage since it successfully fought off a takeover approach from Pfizer in 2014.
THE Frenchman is proud of the way in which he and the board of directors fought off an unwanted overture. He is scathing about what happens in takeovers.
‘When you accept an offer you make some money as a manager and the shareholders are happy because they got a premium. The problem is the ecosystem goes. The company disappears and becomes a branch, then the substance [the intellectual property behind the company] disappears.’
By staying independent, aZ has grown by leaps and bounds, developing a whole range of new medicines to fight cancer. In the pandemic, soriot quietly engineered one of the biggest recent takeovers by a UK firm when he bought the Boston-based rare disease group alexion for £28bn. He believes the expertise bought fits in with aZ’s ground-breaking work on immunology treatments, where the body’s own defences fight disease, and could be valuable in advancing its already promising work on kidney diseases.
For someone who has been chief executive for nearly a decade, and steered aZ into the enviable position of being the UK’s most valuable company, soriot shows no sign of tiring of the excitement.
This autumn another of his dreams will be fulfilled when aZ’s £1bn-plus research centre opens in cambridge.
soriot wants it to be a temple of science and medicine, working alongside the nearby addenbrooke’s Hospital and laboratory of Molecular Biology, which has the ‘highest density’ of Nobel prize-winners of any research institute in the world.
Unusually, the aZ facility will offer secure research facilities to scientists with great ideas from outside the company. Just like the embrace of Professor sarah Gilbert’s (pictured) Oxford vaccine, he regards the new research centre as another noble cause.