Germany’s vaccine committee has said AstraZeneca’s Covid jab should only be given to people aged under 65.
For the effectiveness of the vaccine in those over 65 the committee mentioned “insufficient data”.
EU regulators have said, efficacy studies for the AstraZeneca vaccine have so far been carried out on a small sample of the elderly population.
On Friday, the European Medicines Agency is to make a decision whether to approve the vaccine for use across the EU.
For weeks now the UK has been using the AstraZeneca vaccine in its mass immunisation programme. Public health officials say the vaccine is safe and provides “high levels of protection” against Covid-19.
The news comes with the EU in dispute with leading manufacturers over a shortage of vaccines on the continent. Production issues at its Europe-based plants mean it will be unable to deliver the promised number of doses to the bloc said the UK- based AstraZeneca.
Pfizer-BioNTech has also cut the number of dozes it is delivering to the 27-member bloc. But the EU says the firm must respect its commitments and deliver the vaccine jabs by diverting stock from the UK.
However, all of the regulators and experts in different countries have been looking at the same data on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
The scientists who ran the trials have always been upfront about this. But they say there is other evidence to suggest the vaccine will work well in older adults. Studies show that people aged over 65s have strong immune responses to the vaccine. After receiving the shots, their blood has plenty of the required antibodies that can fight coronavirus.
The UK has been using the AstraZeneca vaccine in its mass immunisation programme for weeks now, and should soon have more proof from the real world setting about how much protection the shots give.
The independent vaccine commission advising the German government said on Thursday that there were “currently insufficient data available to assess the vaccine efficacy from 65 years of age” and recommended “the AstraZeneca vaccine… should only be offered to people aged 18-64 years at each stage”.
However, Dr Mary Ramsay, Head of Immunisations at Public Health England, said both the AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are “safe and provide high levels of protection against Covid-19, particularly against severe disease.
“There were too few cases in older people in the AstraZeneca trials to observe precise levels of protection in this group, but data on immune responses were very reassuring.”
