Britain has rapidly secured a deal for an initial 5m doses of a new US vaccine which has nearly 95% effectiveness in interim results, after fears earlier that the UK had missed out on supplies.
The deal done on Monday will mean vaccines could be delivered to the UK from spring 2021 if approved by the medicines regulator and increases the total number of doses secured by the UK to 355m.
At a Downing Street press conference, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said the preliminary results were “excellent news”, adding: “Although I stress that this is preliminary, the safety data is limited and their production facilities are not yet at scale.” Hancock said the government had secured an “initial agreement” for 5m doses.
The US biotech firm Moderna revealed significant results from phase 3 trials of its jab, with an interim analysis showing its vaccine has an efficacy of 94.5% and has said it plans to apply to the US regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, for emergency-use authorisation in the coming weeks.
Moderna has agreed to provide the US with 100m doses, with an option to buy 400m more, and the European commission has a “potential purchase agreement” for 80m-160m doses.
However, the UK had chosen not to participate in the EU vaccine purchase scheme, with Hancock, arguing in July that the government could source vaccine faster on its own.
The UK had initially chosen not to proceed with the Moderna vaccine but on Monday the government said it was in “advanced discussions” about acquiring some of the supply.
Earlier a government spokesman said the company was scaling up its European supply chain but that it would be around four to six months before the vaccine might be available in the UK, a far longer timeframe than the Pfizer-BionTech vaccine, which the chief scientific officer has said could be available by Christmas.
A Downing Street spokesman said the UK had prioritised securing vaccines to give the highest chance of successful and swift access. “What we’ve done is prioritised agreements with vaccine developers who offer different types of vaccines, can provide early supply to the UK and have advanced manufacturing supply chains in place,” he said.
One government source with knowledge of the procurement process said it had been ultimately the decision of vaccine taskforce chair, Kate Bingham, not to acquire the Morderna vaccine.
A government spokesperson welcomed the results from Moderna but said the UK still had access to significant numbers of other vaccines. “The news from Moderna appears to be good and represents another significant step towards finding an effective Covid-19 vaccine,” the spokesman said.
The government spokesman said that the UK would still have early access to 350m vaccines doses through agreements with six separate vaccine developers, including three currently in phase 3 clinical trials.
Those include:
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100m doses of the University of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine
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40m doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, reported last week to have 90% effectiveness
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60m doses of Novavax vaccine
The spokesman said the Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine “is based on the same platform as Moderna’s vaccine and if approved by the medicines regulator, is expected to begin delivery as early as December 2020.”
Martin McKee, a professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the UK’s decision not to take part in the EU’s purchasing scheme could be an error – though there were many factors the UK would have been taking into consideration.
“There are still many uncertainties about which vaccines will be best, given factors such as cost, effectiveness in different groups, and logistics, so it is possible that the UK may not be disadvantaged,” he said. “However, it does seem an unnecessary gamble to exclude yourself from a larger purchasing consortium.”
One key advantage of the Moderna vaccine is that it can be stored at normal refrigerator temperatures, rather than the Pfizer vaccine, which must be stored in extremely low temperatures of -70C to remain stable.
The European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said her officials had concluded exploratory talks with Moderna.
“We hope to finalise the contract soon,” she said. “We do not know at this stage which vaccines will end up being safe and effective. The European Medicines Agency will authorise them only after a robust assessment. And this is why we need to have a broad portfolio of vaccines based on very different technologies in parallel”.
