The disappointing study results for the Covid-19 vaccine from CureVac have also been confirmed after a final analysis. Accordingly, the vaccine showed an effectiveness of 48 percent against Covid disease of any severity and in all age groups, as the Tübingen biotech company announced on Wednesday evening. In an interim analysis two weeks ago, it was 47 percent. In the final evaluation, however, according to CureVac, a “significant protective effect” of the vaccine was observed in study participants between 18 and 60 years of age. However, they are less at risk of infection than older people.

In this age group, an effectiveness of 53 percent against a disease of any severity and of 77 percent against moderate and severe disease was observed.

The vaccinated study participants at this age were fully protected from hospitalization or death - there were six cases in the group that received a placebo.

For study participants over 60 years of age, who represented nine percent of the cases examined, no statistically unambiguous determination of the effectiveness was possible.

A total of 228 Covid cases examined

CureVac stated that it is in an ongoing exchange with the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to continue the approval process for the vaccine. The company's vaccine is not included in the plans of the Federal Ministry of Health for 2022. Overall, Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) plans to procure so much corona vaccine for 2022 that every person in Germany could be vaccinated twice. The CDU politician announced this on Wednesday in the federal cabinet, according to information from Reuters from participant circles.

In a report submitted to the cabinet by the Ministry of Health, it is said that in addition to the purchase of 84.4 million vaccine doses from BioNTech / Pfizer, a mix of different vaccine technologies and manufacturers is being used.

In addition to the Curevac vaccine, the AstraZeneca vaccine is also not included.

Instead, the procurement of 31.8 million doses of the mRNA vaccine from Moderna is planned, along with 18.3 million doses of the vector vaccine from Johnson & Johnson.

In addition, the previously unapproved protein or inactive vaccines are to be procured from Sanofi (42.7 million doses), Novavax (16.3 million doses) and Valneva (eleven million doses).

A total of 204 million cans is planned.

"Believe that this efficacy profile makes an important contribution"

CureVac CEO Franz-Werner Haas was nevertheless confident: "We believe that this efficacy profile makes an important contribution to coping with the Covid 19 pandemic and dealing with the dynamic spread of the virus variants." However, he himself had recently said that CureVac must achieve an effectiveness of 50 percent for an application for approval.

In the final analysis, a total of 228 Covid cases were examined, 83 of them in the vaccine group.

In the age group from 18 to 60 years, the variant-dependent effectiveness ranged from around 42 to 67 percent.

15 virus variants were observed in the evaluation, the original virus strain, on the other hand, hardly ever occurred.

A total of around 40,000 subjects in ten countries in Latin America and Europe took part in the study.