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The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine clearly will save lives. If Australia were faced with high levels of community transmission like those seen in the UK, then the priority should simply be to get vaccines into arms. If it were Australia’s only option, I would be comfortable being vaccinated with it. To be clear, there are no concerns regarding the safety of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. Either into a situation where we’re living with COVID forever, or a situation in which we can actually achieve elimination of COVID in Australia.” “It’s like a fork in the road – whichever choice we make will take us one way or another. Professor Raina MacIntyre, one of Australia’s leading epidemiologists and head of the Biosecurity Program at the Kirby Institute, warned against short-term thinking in a recent interview: It’s no longer possible to achieve herd immunity against it with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, although herd immunity can likely still be achieved with high efficacy vaccines such as the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna products. The emergence of the UK variant (B.1.1.7) has changed everything. It gets worse, because we’re now facing variants of SARS-CoV-2 which are substantially more transmissible, and hence have a higher basic reproduction number (R0). We can see that we’d probably need to vaccinate over 96% of the population to achieve herd immunity if we used the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, but perhaps only 63% with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
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If we gave the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine to the majority of Australians, a substantial proportion of the population won’t be protected from symptomatic infection, and Australia definitely won’t achieve herd immunity. To put these results in context, the influenza vaccine typically reduces the risk of getting sick by about 40-60%. The Moderna vaccine was found to have an efficacy of 94.1%. Moderna designed a vaccine using the same mRNA technology as Pfizer/BioNTech. In contrast, the efficacy of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is 95.0%. The efficacy of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine (defined as preventing symptomatic, test-confirmed COVID-19) is 62.1%. People who are vaccinated in the first phase(s) will likely receive the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, and the rest of the population will receive the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. Phase 3 trials are not yet complete for the Novavax vaccine, so the Government intends to chiefly rely on two vaccines.
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There are a lot of good things about the strategy, particularly the prioritisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians – a population at high risk of developing severe COVID-19. Last week, the Australian Government announced the national COVID-19 vaccine roll-out strategy. Zoi Rekons Australia needs herd immunity, But The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine won’t deliver it