AstraZeneca. There is also the Aifa ok for the Italian-speaking vaccine

• Covid.

  EU: "Contracts signed for 2.3 billion vaccines".

  Ok Aifa for AstraZeneca

• Covid, Ema: green light for AstraZeneca vaccine from the age of 18

• Brussels publishes the contract with AstraZeneca.

  Here is the text

• The EU Commission publishes the contract with AstraZeneca.

  Von der Leyen: "Clear and binding"

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January 30, 2021 After yesterday's EMA, today there is also the Aifa ok for the AstraZeneca anti-Covid vaccine, with the recommendation to administer it preferably to people under 55, while the EMA authorizes its use for everyone over 18 years.

The vaccine name is coded: ChAdOx1 nCoV-19.

But beyond the difficulty of pronouncing it, the result of the work developed in the laboratories of the Jenner Institute of the University of Oxford, in collaboration with the Oxford Vaccine Group, and with the significant all-Italian contribution of the Irbm of Pomezia, is a more concrete hopes to eradicate the coronavirus.

After the half mess of the phase III clinical trial that "by mistake" discovered greater efficacy with a dose and a half instead of two doses, and the stop to the administration for the over 65s in Germany (too few data on this range of age), the vaccine already in distribution since the beginning of January in Great Britain also lands in the European Union with the green light of the EMA.

Each country is called to give its ok for employment within its borders, and today here is the Italian one.

The vaccine is based on the "viral vector" technique, that is the use of a virus similar to the one you want to prevent but not aggressive, to which genetic information is "glued" which hopefully will trigger the response immune system.

And this is precisely what they do in the laboratories of Pomezia: Irbm is one of the global leaders in the production of viral vectors.

This vaccine in particular uses a replication-deficient chimpanzee viral vector based on a weakened version of a common cold virus (adenovirus), which causes infections in chimpanzees and contains the genetic material of the spike protein Sars-CoV-2.

After vaccination, the surface spike protein is produced, which activates the immune system to attack the Covid-19 virus if it later infects the body.

The recombinant adenovirus vector (ChAdOx1) was chosen to generate a strong immune response from a single dose and is not replicating, therefore it cannot cause an infection in the vaccinated individual.

Vaccines made with the ChAdOx1 virus have been shown to be well tolerated, although they can cause temporary side effects, such as fever, flu-like symptoms, headache or arm pain.

The total production capacity is currently equal to two billion doses.

Certainly for Italy above all the green light would have been a breath of fresh air, were it not for the fact that the company in recent days has announced a monster cut in the supplies expected in Europe, up to 60%.

On paper, Italy has pre-emptioned 40.38 million doses, and AstraZeneca's serum should have taken the lion's share in the first quarter of the plans of the special commissioner Arcuri.

Lost the first month, it will now be a question of speeding up to complement the weekly doses sent by Pfizer, about 400 thousand, and those, for now a few tens of thousands, that Moderna has started to send.