AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine and mRNA COVID-19 vaccines provide equivalent protection against hospitalisation and death following two doses, a new expert review of data from 79 studies has found.

The data shows that both offer 91.3-92.5 per cent protection against hospitalisation and 91.4-93.3 per cent protection against death regardless of age and with no statistical difference.

While data available relates to Delta and earlier variants, emerging statistics indicate similar findings on serious COVID-19 outcomes resulting from Omicron.

The data, reviewed by infectious disease experts across Asia, comes from VIEW-hub, an interactive platform for visualising global data on vaccine use and impact developed by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the International Vaccine Access Center.

The platform is updated on a weekly basis to include global real-world studies on vaccine effectiveness.

The 79 studies reviewed include comparative effectiveness data for AstraZeneca’s vaccine and mRNA vaccines.

The platform is not designed to capture the safety outcomes of these studies, preventing similar safety comparisons.

Assoc Prof Dr Đỗ Văn Dũng, head of the HCM City University of Medicine and Pharmacy’s public health department, said: “A COVID-19 vaccine’s protection against severe disease progression is the best measure of its effectiveness. While our body’s antibody level wanes over time following vaccination, other protection mechanisms do not decrease as quickly, helping the body to fight the virus if we are infected and reducing the risks of serious COVID-19 consequences.”

AstraZeneca’s vaccine is a ‘viral vector’ vaccine, which means a version of a virus that cannot cause disease is used as part of the vaccine, and so if the body is exposed to the real virus later it is able to fight it.

This technology has been used by scientists for the past 40 years to fight other infectious diseases such as the flu, Zika, Ebola, and HIV. — VNS