The German laboratory CureVac has just announced the final results of clinical trials conducted on its candidate vaccine against Covid-19. According to the data, the CVnCoV vaccine has shown an overall efficacy of 48% “regardless of its severity”. For the laboratory, these mixed results can be explained by the rapid diffusion of the new variants.
48% efficiency for the German vaccine candidate CureVac
The vaccine developed by the CureVac laboratory against Covid-19 would only be 48% effective. This was announced by the German company on Wednesday, June 30, 2021, based on the full results of a large-scale clinical trial. Like the BioNTech / Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the CureVac vaccine is based on the principle of messenger RNA. In a statement, the laboratory declared that “ the CVnCoV vaccine candidate demonstrated an overall efficacy of 48% (83 cases in the vaccinated group, 145 in the placebo group) against Covid-19 disease, regardless of its severity “.
According to the German laboratory, the performance of the candidate vaccine is slightly better for the age group of 18-60 years since the effectiveness of the serum reaches 53%. For these individuals, the CureVac vaccine is 77% effective against moderate and severe forms of Covid-19 and 100% in preventing hospitalizations and deaths. As for those over 60, the press release indicates that participants represented only 9% of the cases studied, and that in this sense, ” the available data did not allow statistically clear efficacy to be determined “.
The laboratory questions the rapid spread of new variants
According to the German laboratory, these mixed results could be explained by the rapid diffusion of the new variants. Indeed, when the interim analyzes were published in mid-June, officials had already mentioned “ a great diversity of mutations ”Through sequencing since so-called worrying variants had been identified in more than half of the patients. For Peter Kremsner, director of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Tübingen, who is participating in the CureVac study, these results could rather be explained by the fact that the vaccine was weakly dosed.
Now and in any event, the European Medicines Agency must decide whether or not to give the green light to its marketing, while the European Commission has already signed a contract with biotech on the purchase of 405 million doses.
