The World Health Organisation has officially recommended the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine for people over the age of 65 saying it should be used without upper age limit.

The call came after WHO experts reviewed evidence from studies of the vaccine and reported there is no reason it shouldn’t be used against the South Africa variant because it should still prevent severe illness and death.

At a press conference on Wednesday, a director at the WHO, Dr Alejandro Cravioto said that the jab could be given without an upper age limit even as he backed up the UK’s strategy of spacing the first and second dose by three months, saying between eight and 12 weeks was ideal for maximum protection.

Some European countries that criticised the jab have refused to use it among their older populations. Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Poland, Hungary, and Italy had delayed their rollout of the vaccine to older people over claims that there wasn’t enough proof it worked.

But Cravioto said there was no reason that places with the South African variant of the virus should not use the vaccine to keep down hospital admissions and deaths with the virus, in the wake of a study suggesting it may be less effective against it.

In a new report on Wednesday, the WHO said that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was, overall, 63 percent effective at preventing Covid-19 symptoms, noting that the efficacy is expected to be higher at preventing severe illness and close to 100 percent for death, but it is not known how well it will stop the virus from spreading.

According to WHO’s Dr Joachim Hombach, the immune response in people over 65 is almost the same as in younger people, giving confidence that the vaccine is protective.

The WHO’s director for vaccines said that even if the vaccine was less effective than billed, it should still be used.

“Even with a hypothetical drop in efficacy, it’s still the right thing to do to vaccinate adults with a low efficacy vaccine because of the high risk of severe disease in that age group.

“Even if the efficacy was substantially lower than what was measured, it’s still the right thing to do.”

In its report the WHO stated: “Because a relatively small number of participants aged 65 years or over were recruited into the clinical trials, there were few cases of Covid-19 in either the vaccine or the control group in this age category, and thus the confidence interval on the efficacy estimate is very wide.

“More precise efficacy estimates for this age group are expected soon, from both ongoing trials and vaccine effectiveness studies in countries that are using this vaccine.”

TodayNG