It is worth taking a moment to stand back and applaud Sarah Gilbert and the Oxford vaccine team’s achievement. The data released this evening by Public Health England shows that a single dose of both the Oxford /AstraZeneca vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine cuts the risk of hospitalisation by 80 per cent in the over-80s, the most vulnerable group. It also suggests that the Oxford one, despite its messy trial data, is slightly more effective than the Pfizer vaccine in preventing symptomatic infection among the over-70s.
The efficacy of the Oxford vaccine has completely changed the outlook for the UK. This country has enough doses of it ordered to cover everyone, it really is the workhorse of the immunisation programme, and these statistics suggest that the UK is definitively on its way out of lockdown.
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