Germany’s CureVac Vaccine ‘Fails’ In Pivotal Coronavirus Vaccine Trial

Germany’s CureVac Vaccine ‘Fails’ In Pivotal Coronavirus Vaccine Trial.

Germany’s CureVac Vaccine ‘Fails’ pivotal vaccine trial with surprisingly low efficacy rates. This now puts in doubt hundreds of millions of doses which had expected to be supplied to the European Union.

The CureVac vaccine is produced by a German company and on Wednesday they released figures from their late stage trial. Surprisingly the vaccine only showed to be 47 per cent effective.

The coronavirus vaccine named CVnCoV had been going through an interim analysis. The prospective vaccine had become increasingly important for possible future use after age limits were imposed on both the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. These vaccines saw age limits imposed after being linked to blood clotting, which, although extremely rare could possibly prove to be fatal.

Many had hoped that the German vaccine would be able to bring relief amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic for lower to middle income countries that so far have struggled with vaccinating their populations.

According to the company multiple virus variants had accounted for the coronavirus infections in the population used for the study. They do believe however that the vaccine will be more effective in younger people as shown by the interim results. Sadly though for those over 60 it has proven to be less effective.

The Chief Executive Franz-Werner Haas, has commented that: “While we were hoping for a stronger interim outcome, we recognize that demonstrating high efficacy in this unprecedented broad diversity of variants is challenging. As we are continuing toward the final analysis with a minimum of 80 additional cases, the overall vaccine efficacy may change”.

Dr Amesh Adalja, from Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security hopes to see data on the vaccines potential for stopping hospitalisations and death. The doctor highlighted the fact that: “If it can do that, even with a 47 per cent efficacy in symptomatic disease, that’s still a very valuable thing. That’s all we’ve ever wanted vaccines to do.”

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