UN OKs AstraZeneca vaccine
Move aims to help agency’s COVAX effort
TORONTO — The World Health Organization has granted emergency authorization to AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine, which should allow the U.N. agency’s partners to ship millions of doses worldwide as part of a U.N.-backed program to tame the pandemic.
In a statement Monday, the WHO said it was clearing the AstraZeneca vaccines made by the Serum Institute of India and South Korea’s AstraZeneca-SKBio.
The WHO’s green light for the AstraZeneca vaccine is only the second one the U.N. health agency has issued after authorizing the PfizerBioNTech vaccine in December. Monday’s announcement should trigger the delivery of hundreds of millions of doses to countries that have signed up for the U.N.-backed COVAX effort, which aims to deliver vaccines to the world’s most vulnerable people.
“Countries with no access to vaccines to date will finally be able to start vaccinating their health workers and populations at risk,” said Dr Mariângela Simão, the WHO’s Assistant-Director General for Access to Medicines and Health Products.
The coronavirus pandemic has infected about 109 million people worldwide and killed at least 2.4 million of them. But many of the world’s countries have not yet started vaccination programs and even rich nations face shortages of doses as manufacturers struggle to ramp up production.
The AstraZeneca vaccine has already been authorized in more than 50 countries, including Britain, India, Argentina and Mexico. It is cheaper and easier to handle than the PfizerBioNTech vaccine, which needs deep cold storage not widespread in many developing nations. Both vaccines require two shots per person, given weeks apart.
Last week, WHO vaccine experts recommended the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine for people over 18, including in countries that have detected variants of COVID-19.
But the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said countries that had identified a virus variant first seen in South Africa should be “cautious” in their use of the AstraZeneca vaccine, suggesting that other shots be prioritized instead.
The AstraZeneca vaccine forms the bulk of COVAX’s current stockpile and concerns were raised recently after an early study suggested it might not prevent mild and moderate disease caused by the South Africa variant. Last week, South Africa opted instead to use an unlicensed shot from Johnson & Johnson for its health-care workers.
COVAX has already missed its own goal of beginning vaccinations in poor countries even as shots were rolled out in rich countries. Numerous developing countries have rushed to sign their own private deals to buy vaccines, unwilling to wait for COVAX.
WHO and its partners, including the vaccines alliance GAVI, have not said which countries will receive the first COVAX doses. But an initial plan showed some rich countries with multiple private vaccine deals, including Canada, South Korea and New Zealand, are also scheduled to get early doses from COVAX.
Some public health experts called that “very problematic” and attributed it to COVAX’s flawed design, which allowed donor countries to purchase vaccines from the program while also signing their own commercial deals.