Astrazeneca will carry out additional trials of the Covid vaccine it has developed with Oxford University to shore up confidence over its effectiveness, the drugmaker’s chief executive said yesterday.
The Oxford team, whose own trials suggest that the vaccine could be 90 per cent effective, said that the extra testing was not expected to slow an application for regulatory approval in Britain, which ministers believe could come before the end of the year.
However, Pascal Soriat, Astrazeneca’s chief executive, suggested that data submitted to the UK regulator from trials in the UK and Brazil was unlikely to be sufficient to win regulatory clearance in the United States.
His comments capped a tumultuous week for the Oxford vaccine group, whose announcement on Monday of an inoculation
