AstraZeneca CEO Says His Vaccine Gives 100% Protection Against Coronavirus

Pascal Soriot in an interview said that his company’s vaccine which is being evaluated by Britain's independent medicines regulator provides "100% protection" against severe Covid disease requiring hospitalization.

(Representative Image/ Getty)

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of AstraZeneca on Sunday, said that the Covid-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford has achieved a "winning formula" for efficacy.  Pascal Soriot in an interview said that his company’s vaccine which is being evaluated by Britain's independent medicines regulator provides "100% protection" against severe Covid disease requiring hospitalization. Soriot said that he believes trials will show his firm has achieved a vaccine efficacy equal to Pfizer-BioNTech at 95 per cent and Moderna at 94.5 per cent. "We think we have figured out the winning formula and how to get efficacy that, after two doses, is up there with everybody else," the chief executive said explaining data would be published at "some point". On December 23, the UK government announced that the developers of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine had submitted their data to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) for approval for a mass rollout. According to The Sunday Telegraph, a daily newspaper in the UK, the AstraZeneca vaccine may get approval on Monday. The UK's independent medicines regulator first authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which has been given to hundreds of thousands of the country's most vulnerable people since its rollout last month. As the UK government has ordered 100 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca, the bulk of Britain's vaccine requirements are expected to be met by the jab. Trials of the “Covishield” vaccine developed by AstraZeneca, have shown varying outcomes in terms of efficacy. The vaccine initially showed an average 70% effectiveness but that level jumped to 90% depending on the dosage.