London: Britain’s early deployment of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine to protect against Covid may be responsible for the country’s lower death rates compared to other European countries, a UK vaccine expert has said.
Dr Clive Dix, former chairman of the UK’s Vaccine Task Force, told the Daily Telegraph that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine – manufactured and administered in India as Covishield – may offer stronger long-term protection against severe Covid and death.
“If you look across Europe, with the rise in cases, there’s also a corresponding lagged rise in deaths, but not in the UK, and we have to understand that,” said Dr Dix. “I personally believe that’s because most of our vulnerable people were given the AstraZeneca vaccine,” he said.
According to Our World in Data, a website run by the University of Oxford, the UK has 1.7 daily deaths from Covid per million people. In comparison, the EU as a whole has almost four.
The key, Dix believes, is that although the RNA jabs such as Pfizer/BioNTech produce a more obvious and rapid jump in antibody levels in lab tests, other vaccines may be better at priming another part of the immune system called cellular immunity.