Joseph Milton
Dr Joseph Milton is a senior media officer at the Australian Science Media Centre.
AstraZeneca developed the first vaccine for COVID-19, beating the competition, but this week they’ve announced they’re withdrawing the jab worldwide following a drop in demand.
More than 3 billion doses of the vaccine, called Vaxzevria, have been administered globally, and AstraZeneca said it is “incredibly proud” of it.
Vaxzevria was developed in conjunction with scientists at the University of Oxford, UK, who stunned the world by producing a vaccine in just 10 months, a process that would generally take a decade The team was awarded the world’s oldest prize in science, the Copley Medal, by the UK’s Royal Society in recognition of their achievements in 2022.
Experts contacted by the UK Science Media Centre (SMC) said that, while the vaccine was dogged by rare but serious side effects, not to mention more than its fair share of misinformation, it’s important to remember that its rapid development saved millions of lives.
“We seem to forget how desperate the global population was for an effective COVID-19 vaccine,” Professor Jonathan Ball, Deputy Director of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, told the UK SMC.
And Adam Finn, Professor of Paediatrics at the UK’s University of Bristol, said the speed of development and low cost of the vaccine meant “it could be used in many of the poorer countries in the world.”
Dr Michael Head, a Senior Research Fellow in Global Health at the University of Southampton, UK, said the vaccine played a vital role in tackling the emerging Delta variant of COVID-19 in India, which he described as a “humanitarian crisis”.
“India was the main producer of the AstraZeneca vaccine at that time, amid global shortages and very high COVID-19 burdens. It will have saved so many lives in India alone across 2021 and 2022.”
The vaccine cost “only US$4-8 a shot”, compared with “between US$20 and US$30 per shot” for the mRNA vaccines later developed by Pfizer and Moderna, added Peter Openshaw, a Professor of Experimental Medicine at Imperial College London.
And those mRNA vaccines “needed a full cold chain, making them unavailable in resource-poor setting”, he added.
But, “the lives saved… have to be balanced against the rare but potentially serious side effects, specifically vaccine-induced thrombocytopenia and thrombosis (VITT) that were reported in about one in 500,000 AstraZeneca vaccine recipients,” he acknowledged.
However, it’s not just the side effects that have killed off the vaccine, said Finn: “Global demand for all COVID-19 vaccines is now much lower and overall supply exceeds demand.”
And the AstraZeneca vaccine has not kept up with changes in the SARS-CoV-2 virus as new variants have emerged, he added.
“[It] expresses the original Wuhan Spike protein, and has not been updated, [so] is probably now much less effective than it was to begin with because the Spike protein on the SARS-CoV-2 variants now circulating has changed a good deal over time as the virus has evolved.”
Meanwhile, “other vaccines, particularly those capable of giving protection against newly emerging variants of concern have come to the fore,” says Ball.
That means “there is probably no commercial case for continuing to manufacture and distribute the vaccine. I think this is likely to be the main reason the company has decided to discontinue making and selling it”, concluded Finn.
You can read the UK EXPERT REACTION in full here
First published in Science Deadline, the weekly newsletter of the Australian Science Media Centre.