The EU may still have to wait to receive the hundreds of millions of doses of Covid-19 vaccine ordered from the German laboratory CureVac. On the evening of Wednesday 16 June, the company published inconclusive interim results on the effectiveness of its first-generation vaccine candidate (CVnCoV).
“In the unprecedented context of at least 13 variants circulating within the study population subset assessed at this interim analysis, CVnCoV demonstrated an interim vaccine efficacy of 47% against Covid-19 disease of any severity”, CureVac detailed in a statement.
The results obtained at this stage have therefore led to the conclusion that it is effective in young people, but not in those over 60 years of age, the company says.
The analysis included 134 Covid-19 cases. A small proportion of these were attributable to the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, with most being caused by variants.
“While we were hoping for a stronger interim outcome, we recognise that demonstrating high efficacy in this unprecedented broad diversity of variants is challenging”, reacted Franz-Werner Haas, CureVac’s Managing Director.
The study will continue with the examination of at least 80 more cases, he said, assuring that the overall effectiveness of the vaccine was therefore likely to change.
CVnCoV has been under rolling review by the European Medicines Agency since February 2021 and has not yet been granted conditional marketing authorisation. An advance purchase agreement has been concluded by the European Commission with CureVac from November 2020 (see EUROPE 12634/1), guaranteeing the EU delivery of 225 million doses of the vaccine and an additional 180 million optional doses.
At this stage, the Commission does not seem to be overly concerned about the CureVac announcement. Its spokespersons reiterated on Thursday 17 June that this did not in any way jeopardise the EU’s objective of vaccinating 70% of its adult population by July. (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)