Another huge issue had already rocked public confidence. On 25 January, a German-language business newspaper, Handelsblatt, ran a front-page story. “AstraZeneca vaccine apparently hardly effective in seniors,” said the headline. Efficacy in the over-65s, the age group most at risk of dying from Covid, was only 8%, the article claimed..
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Handelsblatt’s sources were not in the German government. Its journalists had been speaking to regulators and vaccine advisers. The figure turned out to be inaccurate – and taken out of context.
There were too few elderly people in the early trials, because the Oxford academics did not want to expose them to risks. And if you have too few people in a trial, the results you get are not reliable. There was simply not enough evidence to prove how well the vaccine worked in the over-65s.
Handelsblatt acknowledged that there was too little data, but that was lost in the ensuing row.
Within days, Stiko, Germany’s vaccination advisory panel, said it would not recommend the vaccine for the over-65s because of the lack of evidence that it worked for them. In France, President Macron said the jab was “quasi-ineffective” in the over-65s.
Within weeks, Macron was forced to say publicly that he would have the jab himself – and by early March it had been approved by France for the over-65s. But the damage had been done.
Bell says you can get only limited data from vaccine trials – you have to see what happens “in the real world. The studies are different, the clinical trial populations are different, the type of virus that people are being exposed to is different. The outcomes are all different”.
“And yet throughout Europe we had lots of these little so-called expert committees saying: ‘Oh God, you can’t use it in the over-50s, oh God, you can’t use it in the under-50s. You can’t use it at all. Well, maybe you could use it if you’re upside down, drinking a milkshake.’ It was unbelievable.”
Real-world data eventually proved that the vaccine worked very well in older people. But it also revealed a serious problem in a tiny minority of younger people. On 7 March, Austria suspended the use of a batch of the vaccine aftera woman of 49 died and another aged 35 became seriously ill with blood disorders shortly after inoculation.
As Covid cases continued to surge,the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said the benefits outweighed the risks, but launched an investigation.
Prof Marie Scully’s first case was admitted to University College hospital, London, in the UK on the weekend of 6-7 March. A young, healthy woman in her 30s had blood clots on the brain and low platelets. “It was most unusual,” said Scully, a consultant haematologist. “We use vaccines all our life. Why would the AZ vaccine suddenly cause this situation?”
But it did, the EMA and MHRA eventually ruled, albeit in only four in a million cases. It was enough for many European countries to restrict the vaccine’s use.
