How AstraZeneca Can Recover From Its Vaccine Stumble
Even without a new trial, Astra and its partner Oxford can get beyond confusing interim data and regain confidence in their still-promising Covid-19 vaccine candidate.
We need vaccines we can believe in. Thankfully, a good result from Astra and Oxford is still possible.
Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
With the Covid-19 pandemic now resurgent across the globe, it’s a comfort to know that there are several promising vaccine candidates in speedy development. Their success is crucial in fighting the virus and charting a path back to normal. It's important, though, that we are able to see rigorous, clean and transparent trial data, to help gain trust in any vaccine and know that proper protocols are in place. Unfortunately, one of the leading vaccine candidates – from AstraZeneca Plc, working with the University of Oxford — is having a problem in this area.
Astra and Oxford released interim data last week from their Covid-19 vaccine trials in the U.K. and Brazil, becoming the third developers after Moderna Inc. and the Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE partnership to provide such early results. Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech had set a high bar, reporting clear and easy-to-assess, though limited, data for their vaccine candidates that showed about 95% efficacy at protecting against Covid-19. While the Astra-Oxford partnership trials faced a risk of coming up short, they did not need to show the same degree of efficacy to still be considered a success. The expectation, though, was that the data would at least be presented in a transparent, straightforward manner with a clear understanding of the trial process. Instead, it was messy and confusing.