Oxford AstraZeneca to withdraw its Covid vaccine from manufacture

by Mick the Ram

After more than three billion doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine being administered, it is being withdrawn from the market.

The Covid-19 vaccine which was developed in record time has been estimated to have saved millions of lives during the pandemic but is now being taken out of circulation due to low demand.

The drug-maker said it was “incredibly proud” of its success, noting that initially, it was the foundation of the UK’s fight back against the virus and the vehicle to bring the country out of lockdown.

However, now the company has reached a commercial decision to end its production moving forward, because demand had shifted to updated vaccines more closely matched to mutated forms of Covid which are currently circulating.

As a consequence, the vaccine is no longer to be manufactured or supplied and AstraZeneca has already voluntarily withdrawn its marketing authorization in the European Union, which previously allowed it to promote the vaccine.

Developed in record time

It was scientists at the University of Oxford who developed the vaccine in record time, making it one of the first shots against Covid-19 to hit the market, when it was rolled out in January 2021.

Millions of people around the world received it, pretty much a year after the World Health Organization first identified the virus outbreak as a pandemic.

Ten years to ten months

A process that normally takes 10 years was remarkably accelerated down to as little as 10 months. It was also cheaper and easier to store than other Covid vaccines. The pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca agreed to manufacture it en masse.

In a statement, AstraZeneca said: “According to independent estimates, over 6.5 million lives were saved in the first year of use alone and our efforts are widely regarded as being a critical component of ending the global pandemic.”

Planning already in motion

There was a widely held belief that work on the vaccine only started once the pandemic hit, but Professor Sarah Gilbert, the architect of the Oxford vaccine, explained that after the Ebola outbreak in 2014 to 2016 it was obvious that the response was too slow.

“We designed a strategy for defeating an unknown enemy and started planning how to go really quickly to have a vaccine in someone in the shortest possible time,” she said; before adding: “We hadn’t got the plan finished, but we did do pretty well”.

Assisted by chimps

The central piece of their plan was a revolutionary style of vaccine known as “plug and play”. It has two highly desirable traits for facing the unknown – it is both fast and flexible.

What they constructed was ChAdOx1 – or Chimpanzee Adenovirus Oxford One, in which scientists took a common cold virus that infected chimpanzees and engineered it to become the building block of a vaccine against almost anything.

The virus from chimps is genetically modified so it cannot cause an infection in humans and can be modified to contain the genetic blueprints for whatever the immune system is required to be trained to attack. For the AstraZeneca vaccine all the scientists had to do was change the package.

Run its course

Professor Adam Finn, from the University of Bristol said: “I think the withdrawal of the vaccine simply reflects it’s no longer useful as it has turned out that this virus is very agile and it has evolved away from the original vaccines, so they have in a sense become irrelevant and only the reformulated vaccines are likely to be used now.”