Study: AstraZeneca vaccine highly effective in India

Does the Indian variant of Sars-CoV-2, B1.617.2, have the capacity to escape vaccines? Is it really more transmissible than the Kent variant, and by how much? Those are the urgent questions which government scientific advisers are going to have to try to answer over the next week or two – and the answers will have profound consequences for life in Britain over the next few months. If the reopening of society and the economy is to be stalled, or even reversed – as some doctors, including the BMA seem to want – it will suppress an economic recovery, and depress an extremely large number of people who had been led to believe that the reopening was ‘irreversible’, to use the Prime Minister’s word.

We don’t have much data to answer the above questions at present, but one piece of evidence which will be taken into account is an observational study of 3,235 healthcare workers based at the Indraprastha Apollo Hospital in Delhi.