Practice English Speaking&Listening with: Oxford's COVID-19 vaccine is highly effective: Phase III trial interim results

The results we've seen today come from the phase III trial, and they're very exciting because,

overall, we had about 70% protection so similar to 'flu vaccines in a good year.

We're very pleased with this result because it means that we can go forward

and apply for regulatory approval and get the vaccine out there and widely used.

When we looked into the data, intriguingly, in one of our dosing regimes, the protection

was around 90% where we used a half dose for the first dose and a full dose for the second dose.

But that means that, because we could use a half dose and get higher protection, we have

more doses available to vaccinate people and we'd be able to cover more of the population sooner.

We vaccinated large numbers of people and half of them had the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine, and half of

them had a different vaccine. Then, over time, some of them became symptomatic.

We compare the number of people that get disease in the vaccinated cohort to the control cohort,

and that gives us an efficacy readout.

Every time a participant comes to the clinic so whether that's when they come for a vaccination or

a follow-up visit we take a blood sample from them and we analyse that to look at their immune

responses, and then we're also following up the volunteers to see how well those immune responses

last, which tells us how long the protection induced by the vaccine might last as well.

Prof Pollard: There's a huge mountain of data that comes from a trial of this size with

23,000 people there's around about half a million pages of data that we've collected,

all of which had to be checked very carefully before we could get to this point today.

Prof Hill: Then the whole package of information on safety immune responses and the efficacy of

the vaccine will go forward to regulators in many different places applying for licensure to use it.

AstraZeneca started manufacturing at large scale over the summer,

and they've been setting up an international network of multiple manufacturing partners

so that the vaccine can be manufactured in many countries around the world.

Prof Pollard: We have a responsibility to makesure that there's equitable accessfor everyone in the world.

Governments will bepurchasing this vaccine and making it available to

the populations of those countries, but also GAVI (the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization)

will be supplied with vaccine, and they can make vaccine available to low-income countries.

Importantly, it's possible to distribute it to every corner of the world

using the normal supply chain for vaccines that are stored at fridge temperatures.

A lot of the background work that's gone into the adenovirus technology

is addressing exactly those questions: how do we make it so that it can be delivered to the

places that it's most needed? How do we make it so that we can scale it up to be deployable in

tens or hundreds of millions of doses? And how do we make it affordable to the people that

are going to need to buy it for deployment in those low- and middle-income countries?

Prof Pollard: This is a huge collaborative effort, with about 250 people here in Oxford; we have 19

trial sites; and then also an international collaboration in Brazil and in South Africa.

I have to say that without the team and without the support

of the team, we wouldn't be where we are today.

I'm delighted by the results that we've seen today and would really

like to thank the teams who've been working really hard over the last months

to bring us to the point where we could look at this interim data.