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Which vaccine will end up in these vials?
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It may come as a surprise given the postponed vaccination dates and delivery bottlenecks, but Germany has actually ordered more than enough corona vaccine.
With the current contracts alone, the Federal Republic has secured more than 310 million doses - almost half would be enough to vaccinate everyone in the country.
The problem: only a fraction of it is still available - and even promised cans could not be delivered as planned.
However, more vaccines should be approved in the coming weeks, which will cushion the bottlenecks and bring significant advantages.
The overview:
AstraZeneca vaccine (AZD1222)
The vaccine should be approved by AstraZeneca and Oxford University later this week.
It is already available in the UK, Argentina, India, Mexico, Brazil, Hungary and Pakistan.
The vaccine from AstraZeneca has one decisive advantage: it can be
stored for over six months
,
even at refrigerator temperatures
.
This eliminates the need for complex cold chains at temperatures as low as 70 degrees below zero.
Resident doctors could also take care of the vaccinations.
Unlike the previously approved products, AZD1222 - the abbreviation for the vaccine - does not contain part of the coronavirus genetic material that is very unstable.
Instead, the genetic information is packaged in a harmless virus.
This does not make you sick, but trains the immune system for the real coronavirus and can thus prevent Covid 19 disease.
According to the Ministry of Health's plan, six million doses of the vaccine could be available by the first quarter.
Three million people were vaccinated with it.
Probably only for under-65s
However, the vaccine will likely only be approved for those under 65.
The German vaccination commission has already issued a corresponding recommendation.
The reason: only a few elderly people took part in the decisive large-scale study with thousands of test subjects.
Meaningful results were therefore not possible for this age group.
In the UK, the vaccine is approved for all ages.
Germany will now probably have to adjust the vaccination schedule
, according to which people aged 80 and over should be vaccinated first.
It is conceivable that medical personnel should now preferentially be vaccinated with the AstraZeneca agent.
They too belong in the group with the highest priority.
Alternatively, people aged 60 and over could also receive the vaccination.
According to published study results, the vaccine from AstraZeneca protects against Covid-19 disease less reliably than the approved products from Biontech and Moderna.
On average, it was able to
prevent 70 percent of Covid 19 diseases
.
The effectiveness, however, fluctuated depending on the dose administered.
Which dose is the right one?
Some of the test subjects accidentally received only half a dose during the first vaccination.
Surprisingly, they later showed the better immune response.
They had 90 percent fewer Covid 19 diseases than those who had only received an ineffective placebo.
In test subjects who received two full doses, the protective effect was on average 62 percent.
Why this is still unclear.
Perhaps the cause was not the different dosage, but the fact that the test subjects were younger with half the dose and therefore reacted better to the vaccination.
Whether half a dose should be administered initially in the EU and a full one later remains to be seen in the course of approval.
Although AstraZeneca's vaccine was less effective in the study results published so far, it is still more
effective than many had hoped
.
In view of the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that a vaccine with an effectiveness of 50 percent be approved.
However, how quickly the vaccine could fill the supply gap is questionable.
AstraZeneca recently reported delivery problems because there were technical problems in a Belgian plant - much to the annoyance of the EU Commission.
Because, according to its own statement, it has already paid hundreds of millions of euros so that production can start before approval.
The EU has now even sent inspectors to the plant to check the statements.
Brexit makes the dispute even more explosive.
Because the deliveries to Great Britain should continue as planned.
The EU is therefore calling for vaccines produced in Great Britain to be made available to EU countries.
Johnson & Johnson vaccine (Ad26.COV2.S)
Similar to the vaccine from AstraZeneca, the product from pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson also has the advantage that it
does not have to be stored so cool
.
And it has another plus: According to the current status,
one dose is sufficient
to get full vaccination protection.
Appointments for second vaccinations were then dropped.
To be on the safe side, the vaccine is being tested in two large studies with tens of thousands of participants each.
One study gives one dose and the other two.
Then it will be seen whether a dose offers comparable protection.
The investigations are ongoing in several countries, including Germany.
Like the AstraZeneca vaccine, Johnson & Johnson uses a harmless virus to deliver pieces of the coronavirus blueprint into the body.
These prepare the immune system for the real pathogen.
Johnson & Johnson also uses this system for its Ebola vaccine.
Germany has ordered 37.25 million cans.
If everything goes as planned, almost half of the people in Germany could be vaccinated with this alone.
However, it is not yet clear how well the vaccination protects against Covid 19 disease
.
First results from the large-scale phase III study are expected next week.
Approval could then follow promptly, possibly within a few weeks.
The results are already being continuously assessed by Ema.
The Federal Ministry of Health expected in early January that the vaccine will be available from the second quarter.
Ten million vaccine doses are expected by the beginning of July.
If one vaccine dose is actually enough, ten million people could be immunized with it.
In the following three months, 23 million more cans are to be delivered.
CureVac vaccine (CVnCoV)
CureVac's vaccine is
the second mRNA vaccine to be developed in Germany
.
The company's headquarters are in Tübingen.
CureVac recently signed a cooperation agreement with pharmaceutical giant Bayer for the vaccine.
Like the Biontech product, the vaccine contains the instructions for a coronavirus protein that the pathogen uses to penetrate body cells and infect them.
This protein alone cannot cause any damage.
However, the body recognizes it as an intruder and puts defenses into position.
These can also stop the real virus.
The mRNA vaccines from Biontech and Moderna have proven to be very effective in the studies that are crucial for approval.
There is therefore justified hope that this will also be the case with the product from CureVac.
But there will only be certainty when the results of the large-scale study are available, in which 35,000 people in Europe and Latin America are taking part.
This vaccine is also given in two doses 28 days apart.
However, the
study has only just begun
.
This means that the Tübingen-based company is more than six months behind its competitors Biontech and Moderna, who had already started the phase III studies in July.
Nevertheless, CureVac is already expecting results in the first quarter, i.e. by the end of March at the latest.
According to the health ministry's plan, the first four million doses could be delivered in the first quarter.
Germany has currently secured
up to 73 million cans
.
However,
approval is not expected until summer
.
If the vaccine is as effective as the other mRNA vaccines, it would also have a significant advantage.
In contrast to Biontech, the CureVac vaccine
does not have to be stored so cool,
according to the manufacturer
.
Accordingly, it lasts for three months even at 5 degrees.
Sanofi vaccines
The French pharmaceutical company Sanofi is also considered a
possible great hope in vaccine development
against Covid-19.
The group is developing two vaccines at the same time: One is also based on mRNA technology.
However, it has not yet been tested on humans.
Another vaccine is based on viral proteins and works in a similar way to the flu vaccine Flublok.
In studies, however, it has not been shown
to be as effective as hoped for the elderly
, so it is now to be adjusted.
If this succeeds, the vaccine could not
be
approved
until the end of 2021 at the earliest
.
In this case, large quantities would probably be available quickly.
Because of the delay, Sanofi now has production capacities free.
The group therefore wants to produce 125 million doses of the Biontech vaccine.
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