Third COVID-19 Vaccine Shows Effectiveness

MONDAY, Nov. 23, 2020 (HealthDay News) — On Monday, AstraZeneca announced that late-stage clinical trials of its COVID-19 vaccine showed it to be 70.4 percent effective, The New York Times reported.

The trials were conducted in the United Kingdom and Brazil in collaboration with the University of Oxford. The AstraZeneca vaccine becomes the third vaccine to show good effectiveness, following on the heels of promising data on vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. Both of the latter two vaccines had effectiveness around 95 percent.

The AstraZeneca results were based on data for two dosing regimens for the vaccine: One regimen showed an effectiveness of 62 percent, the company said, while the other showed 90 percent effectiveness.

The regimen showing 90 percent effectiveness involved a first dose given at half strength and a second dose given at standard strength. No severe cases of COVID-19 emerged among any recipients, and there was a reduction in asymptomatic infections, suggesting that the vaccine was reducing transmission of the virus, AstraZeneca said, according to The Times.

The New York Times Article