Europe's medicines regulator has recommended approving AstraZeneca and Oxford University's Covid-19 vaccine for people over the age of 18.
Europe urgently needs more shots to speed up its inoculation programme with suppliers such as AstraZeneca and Pfizer facing difficulties in delivering the quantities promised for the early months of the year.
Yesterday, a German vaccine committee draft recommendation said the AstraZeneca jab should be given only to people aged between 18 and 64, due to a lack of data about how effective it is in older people.
This is the third Covid vaccine to gain approval from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) following Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, and approval will now go to the European Commission who will grant conditional marketing authorisation to allow it to be distributed in EU member states.
📢 EMA has just recommended granting a conditional marketing authorisation for the #COVID19vaccine AstraZeneca to prevent #COVID19 in people from 18 years of age. 👉Read our press release: https://t.co/YDbOvZEMUN pic.twitter.com/Sbj6TdlGTW
— EU Medicines Agency (@EMA_News) January 29, 2021
This comes after the Commission published their advance purchase agreement with the drugmaker earlier today.
The contract is at the heart of a dispute over access to vaccines, after AstraZeneca announced last week it would fall short of delivering promised doses to the EU by March because of production problems in Belgium.
