The Düsseldorf offices of German daily newspaper Handelsblatt will not be a happy place this morning. Last night, the respected financial paper published a 1,200 word piece claiming that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is only 8 per cent effective among the over-65s. The claim, based on anonymous sources within the German government, caused outrage.
AstraZeneca responded quickly, saying the allegations were ‘completely incorrect’ while a spokesperson for Oxford University said there was ‘no basis for the claims of very low efficacy’, pointing to five peer-reviewed papers into the vaccine’s efficacy. Meanwhile, UK government ministers seethed over the report blasting its recklessness — which came after a day of escalating tensions with the EU over the vaccine rollout.
Now it turns out the whole episode appears to be an unfortunate case of Chinese whispers — the German health ministry has belatedly denied the story, saying the 8 per cent figure instead referred to the proportion of 56 to 69-year-olds in the vaccine trials.
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