The chief executive of AstraZeneca has insisted its Covid-19 vaccine has a future, as he revealed the UK had priority access to the jab and hit out at the “armchair generals” behind “traumatic” attacks on the company.
In his first interview following a string of setbacks, including the emergence of rare fatal side-effects, Pascal Soriot defended the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine and offered new evidence that it could play an important role in the ongoing battle against the disease.
Soriot told the Financial Times that the jab was only slightly less effective against the variant first found in India than the strain identified in Kent and said that in animal studies a new booster had performed well against other variants. AstraZeneca is in talks with governments, including the UK, about new contracts for booster doses, he said.