The link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and the UK’s Covid reprieve

Europe is being forced back into lockdown because of delays in rolling out the AstraZeneca vaccine, the boss of the pharmaceutical giant has claimed.

AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said the decision by most major European nations to restrict the jab earlier this year could explain why Britain’s neighbours are suffering higher intensive care rates than the UK, despite having similar infection numbers.

Soriot explained that Covid vaccines stimulate an antibody response and a T-cell response. But while antibodies decline over time, T-cells are more durable and last longer, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

And the AstraZeneca vaccine, developed in collaboration with Oxford University, has been found to stimulate T-cells “to a higher degree in older people”, he said.

“When you look at the UK, there was a big peak of infections but not so many hospitalisations relative to Europe,” Soriot continued. “In the UK this vaccine was used to vaccinate older people, whereas in Europe initially people thought the vaccine doesn’t work in older people.”

According to The Guardian’s science correspondent Linda Geddes, “there are theoretical reasons” why the UK-developed jab “might trigger slightly different immune responses compared with an mRNA-based vaccine such as the Pfizer jab”.

“Both equip cells with the genetic instructions to make the coronavirus spike protein,” she wrote, “but the AstraZeneca vaccine does so with the help of a modified virus, which the immune system might also be responding to.”

Professor Deborah Dunn-Walters, chair of the British Society for Immunology’s Covid-19 taskforce, told the paper: “It’s a slightly more complicated delivery system, so you might expect there to be differences – but trying to explain those differences would take a lot of research.”

Germany became the first European country to recommend not giving the AstraZeneca jab to people aged over 65, back in January. Officials cited a lack of efficacy data for the age group. Other European countries followed suit, including Italy, France, Poland and Sweden.

Emmanuel Macron was an outspoken critic of the jab, which was “quasi-ineffective on people older than 65, some say those 60 years or older”, he claimed in late January.

France and many other nations later lifted their vaccine restrictions for over-65s as more efficacy data emerged. But independent experts are questioning Soriot’s claims that the UK’s decision to roll out his company’s jab from the start is why the country is being being hit less hard by the fourth wave of infections.

Imperial College London immunology professor Danny Altman told the i news site that it would be “foolhardy” and “distasteful” to get into national comparisons because “these are deaths, not the Eurovision Song Contest”.

Altman added that “efficacy is similar” across the vaccines and that the AstraZeneca jab “helped a lot, but not especially”.

Dr Lance Turtle, senior clinical lecturer in infectious diseases at the University of Liverpool, said that “based on the real-world experience”, it was “unlikely” that the AstraZeneca vaccine is better than the others.

Eleanor Riley, professor of immunology and infectious disease at the University of Edinburgh, told the news site that because the different jabs “have been rolled out at different times and in different groups of people with different underlying risks of severe disease”, making “direct comparison” between them is “very difficult”.

Most people in the UK are being offered the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines as a booster dose.

Asked whether he was disappointed that his vaccine was not being used for the booster campaign, Soriot told the BBC that “in that instance, it was simpler to use one vaccine to boost everybody across the country as opposed to different vaccines”.