German health officials recommended only administering the Covid-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University to people under the age of 65, citing “insufficient data”.
“There are currently insufficient data available to assess the vaccine efficacy from 65 years of age,” the country’s independent vaccine committee said.
“The AstraZeneca vaccine […] should only be offered to people aged 18-64 years at each stage.”
The recommendation came ahead of the European Union’s health watchdog’s own announcement, which was expected the next day.
Earlier, Germany’s health minister, Jens Spahn, had called for a summit between drug companies, manufacturers and politicians to analyse how the rollout of vaccines could be sped up.
Crisis talks are under way between Brussels and London, not least in order to try and forestall the potential strains on health systems and populations from the third wave of the pandemic.
Dr. Adam Barker at ShoreCap noted that the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency had, like its German counterpart, also said that the interim trial results for the vaccine had too few volunteers over the age of 65 “to draw conclusions on efficacy”.
Nonetheless, the data did also show that the vaccine did generate a “good” immune response in over-65s, Barker said.
And although the level of antibodies elicited was less than in younger people, that was “not uncommon” in vaccine studies.
“In addition, this age group received the vaccine at shorter dosing intervals than younger individuals and it is now apparent that a longer dosing interval may be more effective in inducing an immune response.
“As such, we have a situation in which the immune profile of the elderly looks good, the vaccine appears safe, but we can’t know for sure if it actually works in the elderly age group given the small amount of data.”
