Vaccine CureVac fails tests, Italy expected 30.2 million doses

CureVac’s Covid vaccine candidate “demonstrated 47% effectiveness against Covid-19 disease of any severity and did not meet established statistical success criteria.” This is the first verdict that comes from the interim analysis of the international phase 2b / 3 study conducted on about 40 thousand people (Herald study). The results were communicated by the German company. The analysis evaluated the vaccine in the context of at least 13 circulating variants within the population subset under consideration. The available data have been communicated to the European Medicines Agency Ema. The German vaccine was one that the EU had focused on. On the total quantity of this pre-optioned vaccine candidate, the quota for Italy is, according to the data originally communicated by the ministry, equal to 30.2 million doses. The Data Safety Monitoring Board, the company continues in its note, has confirmed a favorable safety profile for the CVnCoV vaccine. The study is continuing until the final analysis and all data will be evaluated for the most appropriate regulatory path, informs CureVac. “We were hoping for a stronger” intermediate “result,” said Franz-Werner Haas, CEO of CureVac. “We recognize that demonstrating high efficacy in this wide and unprecedented diversity of variants is a challenge. As we move towards the final analysis with a minimum of 80 additional cases, the overall efficacy of the vaccine may change,” he warned. 134 cases of Covid-19 were evaluated in the interim analysis. Of these cases, 124 were sequenced to identify the variant that caused the infection. The result confirms that only one case was attributable to the original SARS-CoV-2 virus. More than half of the cases (57%) were caused by variants of concern (VOC).