The vaccine is the third to be approved by Health Canada following the December approval of vaccines developed by Pfizer Inc with BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc.

“With Pfizer, Moderna, and now AstraZeneca, Canada will get more than 6.5 million doses before the end of March,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters. “And there will be tens of millions more doses to come between April and June.”

Canada has ordered 20 million doses of the vaccine from AstraZeneca, and is due to receive 1.9 million through COVAX – the international initiative set up to provide equitable access to vaccines – in the first half of the year.

On Friday, Canada said it had secured an additional 2 million doses through its agreement with Verity Pharmaceuticals Canada Inc and the Serum Institute of India.

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He said he believes trials will show his firm has achieved a vaccine efficacy similar to Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

Earlier, several reports suggested that AstraZeneca vaccine may not be as good as the one made by Pfizer, already being distributed in the UK and other countries. Partial results suggest that the AstraZeneca shot is about 70 percent effective for preventing illness from coronavirus infection, compares to the 95% efficacy reported by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech.

“We think we have figured out the winning formula and how to get efficacy that, after two doses, is up there with everybody else,” the chief executive said, while saying only that data would be published at “some point”.

The United Kingdom government announced on December 23 that the developers of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine had submitted their data to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). Approval is expected to be granted to roll out the jab on January 4.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was the first coronavirus shot to be authorised for use by the UK’s independent medicines regulator and has been given to 600,000 of the country’s most vulnerable people since last month.

Earlier trials had shown different outcomes in the AstraZeneca shot’s efficacy. The vaccine initially showed an average 70 per cent effectiveness but that level jumped to 90 per cent depending on the dosage.

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This comes after drugmaker Pfizer on November 18 said that their coronavirus vaccine candidate has shown 95 percent efficacy in the late-stage trial. The efficacy of vaccine was consistent across age and ethinicity demographics and there were no major side effects.

The vaccine is developed with German partner BioNTech SE.

Moderna had also announced that its experimental Covid-19 vaccine ‘mRNA-1273’ was 94.5 percent effective in preventing coronavirus.

In India, the third phase trial of Indian vaccine candidate Covaxin is also set to start on November 20 in Haryana. The trials will take place at Post Graduate Institute of Medical Science, Rohtak in Haryana.

Covaxin is being developed indigenously by Bharat Biotech in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).

Meanwhile, those worried whether the vaccines can protect against coronavirus mutation can relax. A new study involving a University of York virologist has said that vaccines currently being developed for Covid-19 should not be affected by recent mutation in the virus.

Most vaccines under development worldwide have been modelled on the ‘D-strain’ of the virus.
Since then, the virus has evolved to the globally dominant ‘G-strain’, which now accounts for about 85 per cent of published SARS-CoV-2 genomes.

There had been fears that the G-strain, within the main protein on the surface of the virus, would negatively impact vaccines under development. But the research by Australia’s national science agency – the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) – found no evidence that the change would adversely impact the efficacy of vaccine candidates.

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