EU regulator begins review of Spanish COVID vaccine recall

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The European Union’s medicines regulator has announced that it has started an accelerated review process for an experimental coronavirus vaccine recall made by Spanish company Hipra.

The European Medicines Agency said in a statement that its assessment is based on preliminary data from laboratory studies and research in adults that compared the Hipra booster to the vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNTech. He said early results suggest the immune response achieved with Hipra “may be effective” against COVID-19, including the highly infectious omicron variant.

Hipra is a protein-based vaccine and is made using similar technology to the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine, which was cleared by the EMA and other agencies in December. It contains two lab-made versions of the coronavirus spike protein, which are meant to trigger an immune response when a person is immune.

Hipra is intended as a booster in people who have been fully vaccinated with a messenger RNA vaccine or a vector-based vaccine, such as those made by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.

Scientists believe that using different types of vaccines can increase the body’s immune response and many countries have adopted a “mix and match” strategy for vaccination against COVID-19.

Hipra reportedly sold tens of millions of its vaccines in Vietnam and estimated it could manufacture around 600 million doses this year.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic

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