UK Behind Schedule on Supply of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 Vaccine, Taskforce Head Says

UK Vaccine Taskforce Chairwoman Kate Bingham revealed Wednesday that the country will have millions fewer doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine candidate available by the end of the year than previously anticipated.

Britain should have approximately 4 million doses of the promising vaccine, AZD1222, ready to be deployed by the end of the year, she told British lawmakers during a COVID-19 select committee hearing. That number is significantly less than the UK’s prior projections, which estimated that approximately 30 million doses of the vaccine, which was developed by the University of Oxford and licensed by AstraZeneca (AZ), would be available by September (DID, May 19).

Bingham explained that the previous timeline “was assuming that absolutely everything would work and that there were no hiccups at all in terms of how you scale up [manufacturing].”

“We’re growing live cells, it’s not a straightforward activity,” she told lawmakers. “I have to say, the skills in the UK in advanced manufacturing are world-class, [but] it is challenging.”

In total, the supply deal forged between the UK and AZ will eventually net Britain 100 million doses of the vaccine.

Asked when the first round of vaccines would be deployed to the public, the taskforce chief said that if she were wearing her “rose-tinted specs,” she believed they could be deployed by the end of the year if positive interim data from AZ’s and Pfizer/BioNTech’s late-stage vaccine trials come out in early December. In a less optimistic situation in which positive results don’t arrive by then, trials will continue until efficacy data are ready and acceptable for regulators, and deployment would begin in early 2021, she said.

Despite a high-profile safety incident that forced AZ to temporarily pause its vaccine trials worldwide, CEO Pascal Soriot said the company still thinks it will see results “later this year” depending on the rate of coronavirus infections in the areas where the trials are being conducted. In the U.S., the FDA’s investigation into the safety event that occurred in the UK determined that it was safe for the U.S. late-stage trial to resume after more than a month of downtime (DID, Oct. 28).

Andrew Pollard, chief investigator of the University of Oxford’s global COVID-19 vaccine trials, also told lawmakers Wednesday that he believes there is a “small chance” the AZ vaccine candidate could be ready before Christmas, though he stressed there are still a number of hurdles left to clear. — James Miessler