OREANDA-NEWS. According to the medical journal The Lancet, British biologists together with AstraZeneca employees have completed the second phase of clinical trials of the AZD1222 vaccine. Testing has confirmed that the vaccine is safe and effective when administered to elderly volunteers.

The press service quoted a professor working at the Oxford University and participating in testing the new drug, Sarah Gilbert, who said that WHO specialists have prepared a set of critical factors that must be considered when developing vaccines against COVID-19, such as their safety and the ability to protect the health of people at risk, including such vulnerable group, as senior citizens. A study by British scientists was able to show a positive result in terms of effects on the organism of elderly patients, however, researchers cannot yet say for sure how effective this protection is and how long it lasts.

The study found that older adults tolerated the vaccine surely not worse than younger volunteers, with only standart after-vaccination slightly visible side effects, such as itch after injection or redness of the skin where it was made. The number of antibodies in their bodies, both after one and two doses of the vaccine, was on average similar to the number in young people's bodies after AZD1222, and the reaction of both age groups was almost the same.

The AZD1222 vaccine (ChAdOx1-nCoV-19) is being developed by a group of molecular biologists and medical professionals from the US National Institutes of Health and Oxford. The basis for its development was the ChAdOx1-MERS viral vaccine, which is a chimpanzee adenovirus, presumably a pathogen that is harmless to humans, which can enter its cells, but not multiply in them. Scientists have got the structure of its genome in a special way that it makes the human body itself to produce large numbers of copies of one of the key proteins of the SARS-CoV-2 envelope, which, in turn, help the human immune system to recognize real viral particles.