New Delhi: AstraZeneca, the company which made a COVID-19 vaccine, has surrendered its market authorisation given by the European regulator to supply the vaccine.
The European regulator, the EMA, cancelled the authorisation on Tuesday (May 7) after the company’s request; as per the information shared on its website.
This move from the EMA comes on the heels of news of AstraZeneca admitting to ‘rare side effects’ in an ongoing case in a UK court.
Responding to The Wire‘s query today, AstraZeneca said it had made the withdrawal request in March itself.
“The withdrawal is not related to the vaccine’s safety profile and UK court litigation,” the company said in an emailed reply.
The company also added that after multiple variants of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus causing COVID-19) emerged, the demand of its vaccine, whose brand name is Vaxzervria in the UK, declined.
It must be noted here that as against AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, it was easier to ‘update’ the vaccines of Pfizer and Moderna, which are mRNA-based vaccines. On the other hand, AstraZeneca’s are adenovirus-based.
The two platforms are different. It is easier to modify (or update) mRNA-based vaccines against new variants, which is not possible for adenovirus-based vaccines. Hence the decline in demand for AstraZeneca’s vaccine.
For context, the Indian government had not allowed the importation of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines.
“As multiple, variant COVID-19 vaccines have since been developed, there is a surplus of available updated vaccines,” AstraZeneca also said in its statement.
It added that its vaccine is no longer manufactured or supplied globally.
“We will now work with regulators and our partners to align on a clear path forward to conclude this chapter and significant contribution to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the company said.
It claimed that according to several independent estimates, over 6.5 million lives were saved in the vaccine’s first year of use alone and over three billion doses were supplied globally.
Recently, it was reported that AstraZeneca admitted to rare side effects in a UK court. That led to a panic-driven discourse in India as Covishield was the same as AstraZeneca’s vaccine and was manufactured by the Serum Institute of India.
The admission was misinterpreted as this information coming in the public domain for the first time, but papers published in 2021 itself had spoken about the rare side effects.
The admission was misinterpreted as this information coming in the public domain for the first time, but scientific papers published in 2021 itself had spoken about the rare side effects.
Also, the papers have revealed that rare side effects, which are life-threatening, such as thrombosis or clotting, can only occur between four and 40 days of administration of the dose.
The Wire had reported in detail why some of the fears associated with the vaccine after the development in court were ill-founded. The report can be read here.
