Healthwise

Wednesday 8 November 2023

The triumph of the AstraZeneca vaccine undercut by tragedy

For millions, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was a brilliant discovery. But for the unlucky few, it was a terrifying catastrophe

ByRobert Mendick, CHIEF REPORTER8 November 2023 • 5:00pm

The AstraZeneca vaccine was described by Boris Johnson as 'a triumph for British science'

Just five days after a Christmas spent by millions in lockdown, this was the best gift ever. On December 30, Britain’s regulator gave the green light for the emergency use of a Covid-19 vaccine developed by the University of Oxford in collaboration with the Cambridge-based pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca.

It was announced by Boris Johnson as “a triumph for British science” in a typically enthusiastic post on Twitter. Matt Hancock, the (also Oxford-educated) health secretary whose subsequent fall from grace proved to be spectacular, declared it “a moment to celebrate British innovation” and a time to pay “tribute to the incredible UK scientists at Oxford University and AstraZeneca whose breakthrough will help to save lives around the world”.

The Government had bought 100 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. The way out of the pandemic was becoming clear.

The nation was, too, eternally grateful. Take Wimbledon in June. The crowd rose to applaud not a tennis player, but a bespectacled scientist sitting in the front row of the Royal Box. Professor Sarah Gilbert, co-inventor of Oxford University’s Covid vaccine for which she had recently received a damehood.

Wind the clock forward two years and the trumpeting of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is somewhat muted. The vaccine is no longer used in the UK, quietly shelved some time ago, while a glance at AstraZeneca’s latest financial accounts show that in the three months to the end of June, the Anglo-Swedish group recorded no sales of the Covid-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca, now called Vaxzevria. By comparison, in the first quarter of 2022 it had sold $455 million (£350 million) worth.

The Oxford vaccine has been replaced by other vaccines.

Professor Robert Dingwall, a former member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), the body that advises the Government on vaccination, said there was “no data to suggest it was an unacceptable risk” but that other vaccines offered “fewer risks”.

Undoubtedly, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine prevented a lot of deaths. In total, the company says it supplied three billion doses to 180 countries, two-thirds going to low and lower middle income countries.

Sir Pascal Soriot, AstraZeneca’s chief executive and according to one think tank the highest paid boss among FTSE 100 companies with a £15.3 million pay package last year, had suggested in the summer of 2022 that the vaccine had prevented a million deaths. He may have been modest. Airfinity, a disease forecasting company, subsequently concluded the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine had saved 6.3 million lives worldwide, more than any rival vaccine.

1. A darkening storm

But the storm clouds are now gathering. Legal actions have been launched in the High Court in London, over claims that AstraZeneca caused blood clots that led to deaths and serious injuries. Official figures published by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority (MHRA) suggest at least 81 people died and hundreds more left injured from a specific, rare reaction to the vaccine. Victims have had limbs amputated where the vaccine caused clots; others have been left brain damaged.

Many of those who died or were seriously injured were fit and healthy younger people, for whom Covid-19 posed little or no risk.

Under the Government’s Vaccine Damages payment scheme, 148 claimants have been paid out due to an adverse reaction to a Covid-19 vaccine. Of those, at least 144 were payments for the AstraZeneca vaccine. Fewer than five had had the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine.

Meanwhile, the vaccine compensation scheme – worth a flat rate of £120,000 tax-free for those killed or survivors left “at least 60 per cent disabled” – has been branded woefully inadequate.

The victims had the vaccination out of a sense of duty – it felt the right thing to do to help Britain out of the pandemic and to prevent more vulnerable people being made ill by stopping transmission of the virus – but the result for them and their families has been catastrophic.

Many have been left wondering why they bothered. A World Health Organisation report in June 2022 was unclear about whether the vaccine stopped transmission of the virus. “No substantive data are available related to impact of the vaccine on transmission or viral shedding,” states the report in relation to AstraZeneca. Experts have suggested the AstraZeneca vaccine – much in line with its rivals – prevented transmission for around 70 days after the jab.

Lawyers claim that the vaccine was less safe than the public was led to expect. Should the courts agree, the damages and compensation are likely to be huge.

AstraZeneca will not be drawn on the specific legal action. “We do not comment on ongoing litigation matters,” said a spokesman. But the company stressed that “patient safety is our highest priority”, adding: “Vaxzevria has continuously been shown to have an acceptable safety profile and regulators around the world consistently state that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks of extremely rare potential side effects.”

In a statement, AstraZeneca said: “Our sympathy goes out to anyone who has lost loved ones or reported health problems.”

The Government has underwritten AstraZeneca’s legal bills as part of an agreement put in place when the vaccine was first rolled out. But to date, The Telegraph understands, no out-of-court settlement has been offered in about 80 cases where the drug firm has been notified of an intent to bring a legal claim.

A test case is being brought by Jamie Scott, a father-of-two, whose wife was told three times by doctors he was going to die before he recovered, albeit with a “significant” permanent brain injury. His lawyers argue that the AstraZeneca vaccine caused a rare condition called Vaccine-induced Immune Thrombocytopenia and Thrombosis – or VITT for short. “The defect in the product was the propensity of the product to cause VITT,” states Mr Scott’s legal claim. Further claims are expected to follow, worth in total about £80 million.

2. The vaccine, the WhatsApp messages and the promise of a better Brexit deal

The problem of VITT became particularly acute in the UK where ministers had pushed hard for the Oxford vaccine. Europe was at times wary while the US never approved it for use at all.

Some light can be shed on ministers’ eagerness for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine from looking at WhatsApp messages exchanged between Mr Hancock and others during the pandemic. The messages were passed from Mr Hancock to the co-author of his Pandemic Diaries, the journalist Isabel Oakeshott. She in turn passed them to The Telegraph.

The huge stash of messages – more than 100,000 in total – between ministers, scientists and advisers, have been handed to the Covid-19 public inquiry, which will include hearings next year on the vaccine rollout.

The messages suggest a Government determined to promote the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, in part to bolster Britain’s status in a post-Brexit world.

In May 2020, in early discussions on the vaccine, Mr Hancock told Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer: “But if AZ comes off then in return for saving the world they need to give us a good EU exit deal!”

Then in January 2021, a few days after the MHRA had given AstraZeneca the green light, Mr Hancock told his vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi: “The Oxford vaccine should be seen as a Mini. Made in Oxford. A brilliant piece of British engineering. Accessible to everyone. Ready to change the world.”

When, a little over two months later, many of the largest countries in Europe had paused the vaccine, the health minister Lord Bethell was relaying concerns about the state of mind of the giant pharmaceutical company. “They’re feeling at the end of their tether. Need a big hug…,” Lord Bethell wrote in a message to his boss and close friend Mr Hancock. By then the UK had committed to buying 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine.

3. The rare adverse reaction that has devastated hundreds of lives

The Telegraph has spoken to a number of families left devastated by VITT. About one in 50,000 recipients under the age of 50 of the AstraZeneca vaccine were affected. The European Medicines Agency suggests blood clots and another illness, Guillain-Barré syndrome, which affects the nerves but from which people usually make a full recovery, may affect one in 10,000 people.

The clotting occurred in patients with low counts of blood platelets.

The adverse reaction was extremely rare but because of the scale of the rollout, the death toll is not insignificant. The MHRA, in a report in December last year, officially recorded 81 deaths in the UK from “blood clotting events”... “likely” caused by the AZ vaccine out of a total of 445 cases. The MHRA pointed out the overall fatality rate for anyone suffering a blood clotting event with “concurrent low platelets” was 18 per cent. In other words, almost one in five people who had that specific reaction died from it.

In assessing the safety of a vaccine, authorities must evaluate the potential benefits against any potential harms.

Data published by the Winton Centre at Cambridge University, using figures supplied by the MHRA, suggested that as of April 2021, at a time when there were just 42 cases of coronavirus per 100,000 people, the risk of anyone under 30 ending up in intensive care from the vaccine was almost 10 times more likely than doing so from Covid. The numbers are small – just 1.9 people per 100,000 – but the effects on each individual life are devastating.

It is a horrific condition. One survivor, Ed Jackson, 53, an architect, told The Telegraph he thought he was being “stabbed in the back” and that he was “going to die”. Another, Melle Stewart, a leading musical theatre actress, had a metal plate the size of a hand inserted into her skull to protect her brain after a life-saving operation to reduce swelling.

Others simply did not make it. The Telegraph has spoken to relatives about their losses. Some victims have been reluctant to speak out for fear of the stigma of being branded anti-vaxxers.

Ms Stewart, 42, told The Telegraph she went on to have another vaccine– made by Pfizer/BioNTech – while still in hospital recovering from the AstraZeneca jab that almost killed her. In all, she spent nine months in hospital. Just speaking is a huge effort.

The victims say they have had little to no contact from AstraZeneca or from the Government. They say there have been no apologies and AstraZeneca recently sent out questionnaires to people it thinks may be involved in the lawsuit. Solicitors have advised them not to respond.

The rise of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was spectacular. But the reality is the vaccine that ministers praised for saving the world is no longer used in the country that developed it.

4. Oxford’s urgent hunt for a Covid-19 vaccine

The virus, which originated at the end of 2019 in the city of Wuhan in China, prompted a scramble for vaccines. The Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford – its team led by Dame Sarah Gilbert and Prof Andrew Pollard – was at the forefront of the race to stop Covid-19 in its tracks.

Vaccines normally take years to develop. Covid-19 did not give scientists that luxury. The WhatsApp messages show government advisers were aware of the problems in trying to vaccinate Britain out of the pandemic.

“But we should be cautious of when a vaccine is ready to trial in humans, and I think years is a realistic timeline for a vaccine that is actually ready for widespread deployment,” warned Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, in a message to Mr Hancock sent on Jan 26 2020.

Oxford’s vaccine, made from a vector called ChAdOx1, which is a weakened version of a common cold virus that causes infections in chimpanzees, was different to the Pfizer and Moderna “messenger RNA” (mRNA) vaccines which work by sending genetic code into cells. (Incidentally the two scientists who developed the mRNA technology were this October awarded jointly the Nobel Prize for Medicine.)

The Oxford vaccine was simpler and cheaper and could be stored at fridge temperature rather than requiring super cold freezers. This made it logistically easier to deliver doses to an entire population.

By mid-April 2020, Mr Hancock’s Tiggerish enthusiasm for the Oxford vaccine was beginning to show. “You are totally right, I must own this,” he said to an adviser after seeing a front page headline on the prospect of a vaccine as soon as September.

That it might be an Oxford vaccine was too much for the Oxford-educated Hancock. “I need to meet this scientist – who is at the same Oxford college I was at,” he said.

On the same evening on April 17 2020, Mr Hancock messaged Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, seemingly irritated he was unaware of “this vaccine announcement before it went out”.

What had seemingly vexed the health secretary was a front page “splash” in the Daily Mail which quoted Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford, telling the newspaper: “The aim is to have at least a million doses by around about September, once we know the vaccine efficacy results, and then move even faster from there.”

Mr Hancock said to Sir Patrick: “Is it wise to be promising a vaccine by September?” Sir Patrick, the next day, appeared baffled: “Who promised that? I have been crystal clear that we won’t have anything for 12-18 months at the earliest.”

Mr Hancock replied: “The September date comes from the Oxford team so not us. I’m going to have a deep dive into where we are on vaccines.”

Sir Patrick responded: “Yes the Oxford team have made very rash statements. A deep dive on vaccines is worth doing. We need to bring in the international side, especially DfiD [Department for International Development]. We need to make sure we have domestic access wherever a vaccine comes from (my bet is it comes from either J&J GSK or Merck, not the little players.”

5. Oxford’s deal with AstraZeneca

AstraZeneca was not a major player in the vaccine market. Reports have suggested a deal between Oxford and the giant US pharmaceutical company Merck was in the pipeline but that ministers torpedoed it, fearing there would be no guarantee that Britain would get priority.

On April 30 2020, a fortnight after those reports, AstraZeneca and Oxford University announced a “landmark agreement… for the global development and distribution of the University’s potential recombinant adenovirus vaccine aimed at preventing Covid-19 infection”.

Under the deal, AstraZeneca “would be responsible for development and worldwide manufacturing and distribution of the vaccine” on what would be a not for profit basis.

Mr Hancock had failed to get his name on the press release. Instead the announcement included a quote from Sir Alok Sharma, the business secretary, with whom Mr Hancock appeared to engage in a long-running battle.

In July 2020, Mr Hancock would tell Simon Case, the civil servant in charge of the fight against the virus: “Unbelievably Alok Sharma is attempting a very crass land grab to run clinical trials. Totally nuts. I’m told he’s ‘talking to No 10 about it’ tomorrow.

“I wouldn’t normally be worried but a month or so ago he launched a similar land grab for vaccines and succeeded, delaying vaccine deployment work by weeks in the process. Grateful for short shrift if it reaches your desk.”

A former Downing Street source, defending Sir Alok, said: “There was a very clear decision that responsibility for vaccines should go to BEIS [Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy] away from health and Matt was very cross about it.”

The source said Sir Alok had raised concerns with No 10 about the Department of Health wanting to rush the announcement that work was underway on an Oxford University and AstraZeneca jab, when the scientists involved said they weren’t ready to go public. Boris Johnson ultimately decided to wait.

The process for trialling vaccines was concertinaed. Not just for the Oxford vaccine but its competitors too. Pfizer-BioNtech were making one, and so too was Moderna.

By the early summer, Oxford-AZ were seemingly winning the race to be first to produce a Covid vaccine.

Sir Jonathan Van-Tam, who had gained a cult status through his no-nonsense pandemic press conferences, was wary.

Interpretation is not straight forward but when the health secretary asked him what he made of a meeting in June 2020 to discuss vaccines, Sir Jonathan said: “I would always tell you plain and straight”, adding that the Vaccine Taskforce (VTF), the body set up to investigate and buy up vaccines, may be “needing to back multiple horses for manufacturers beyond Oxford who in my view may be first (they are well ahead now even beyond Moderna) but the vaccine may not be best in class and may only be disease modifying. If disease modifying there will be less to prevent in younger low risk cohorts.”

But it was not plain sailing and the US regulators were seemingly concerned. “The Americans were always grumpy about the UK having its own vaccine,” said Sir John Bell, regius chairman of medicine at Oxford and an adviser to the Vaccine Taskforce. Sir John was also the Government’s chief adviser on life sciences.

The claim is backed up by the WhatsApp messages. On Aug 25 2020, Lord Bethell messaged Mr Hancock: “BTW there’s a lot of turbulence around the Oxford vaccine in America. FDA are for some reason talking if [sic] pulling the trials.”

Trials in the UK and Brazil progressed. But the WhatsApp messages show that behind the scenes, the US authorities were pushing back against the UK vaccine. “Ara [Lord Darzi, academic surgeon] says AZ vx might not get through FDA,” Lord Bethell told Mr Hancock on Nov 23. (By March 2022, AstraZeneca signalled it had finally given up ever trying to get FDA go ahead. “We don’t need to push it in places we are not needed or wanted,” a senior executive told the Financial Times.)

On Dec 2 2020, the MHRA made a momentous announcement. The Pfizer/BioNTech had been given approval for use after a rolling review and the first NHS patient – 91-year-old Maggie Keenan – was given the jab six days later.

On Dec 30, AstraZeneca was given emergency approval for its vaccine. “This is a moment to celebrate British innovation,” declared Mr Hancock. The vaccine, he said, would also be supplied “at a low cost” to some of the “poorest regions of the world”. Brian Pinker, 82, became the first person in the world outside clinical trials to receive the vaccine on Jan 4 2021.

6. The first deaths from an adverse reaction

Three weeks later on Jan 26, the UK recorded what is thought to be the first death from VITT. Dr Stephen Wright, who as a front-line health worker had been entitled to have the jab in the first wave of the rollout, died 10 days after receiving it. The MHRA said it first became aware of “thromboembolic events” only in the week commencing Feb 8, The Telegraph has reported.

At his inquest two years later, the coroner Andrew Harris would describe Dr Wright’s death as a “very unusual and deeply tragic case… My conclusion as to the cause of death is unintended complications of vaccination,” adding: “It is very important to record as fact that it is the AstraZeneca vaccine, but that is different from blaming AstraZeneca.”

Dr Wright’s widow is planning to sue AstraZeneca.

In the weeks after Dr Wright’s death, ministers were setting targets for the vaccine rollout. On March 6, Mr Zahawi, responding to a request from Mr Hancock for a “big story”, told the health secretary to surge through the vaccination of priority groups one to nine – about 32 million people in the UK aged 50 and above. “Why don’t you announce that 1-9 will be done by end March? That will dominate headlines,” he said.

Dr Stephen Wright died 10 days after receiving the AstraZeneca jab CREDIT: Helen William/PA

Mr Hancock replied: “That is a great idea. We are after all nearly there,” to which Mr Zahawi said: “Yes! That would be a great headline and again continues the momentum.”

But a day after that conversation – on March 7 – Austria suspended a batch of the AstraZeneca vaccines after an Austrian citizen died from multiple clots. On March 11, Denmark, Norway and Iceland paused the vaccine in a “precautionary move”. A Danish woman had also died with blood clots. (Denmark would become the first country to stop using AstraZeneca altogether on April 14 pushing back the conclusion of its rollout by a week or two). In the days that followed the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France, Ireland and Spain all temporarily halted the AstraZeneca rollout.

In the UK, the MHRA said the situation was under review but that its advice remained “that the benefit of the vaccines against Covid-19 continue to outweigh any risks”; the European Medicines Agency said its committee had also judged that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine outweighed the risk of side effects. But, it said, patients should be aware of the “extremely small likelihood” of clotting where there were low levels of blood platelets.

The connection had been spotted by Professor Marie Scully, a consultant haematologist at University College London Hospital, who was treating a woman who deteriorated rapidly after developing a clot in her liver. “I saw a young woman in her 30s in early March 2021 with blood clots in the brain and low platelets. I had seen patients with these symptoms before and usually I could pinpoint a cause. This time I could not. It didn’t make sense,” Prof Scully told The Telegraph.

Prof Scully ordered a test for an antibody – called PF4 – which had previously been found in patients on a blood thinning drug heparin which in very rare cases triggered the immune system to produce antibodies that cause clots. “I’d love to tell you why I thought it would be a good idea [to do the PF4 test] but I don’t know why. I had tried everything else and all the other tests were negative,” she recalled.

She discovered three patients with the PF4 antibody who had reacted badly to the vaccine, and who had low blood platelets but were not on the drug thinner.

Prof Scully contacted the MHRA with her findings on March 15 and fired off emails to Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance two days later. “The three patients had only one thing in common. They had all recently had the AstraZeneca vaccine,” said Prof Scully. “At the same time, a German and Norwegian group had similarly made the same diagnosis for a small group of patients.

“We sent an email to colleagues all over Europe, because we wanted hospitals everywhere to know how to diagnose and treat this new condition.”

It was a remarkable bit of detective work that provided medics with a test for the adverse reaction to the vaccine. It may well have saved a lot of lives.

7. Fallout from the doctors’ warnings

The UK had been first and fastest with the rollout and had administered 11 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine by March 15 by the time Austria, Denmark and others had begun to report small numbers of blood clots and possible associated deaths.

On March 11, the MHRA released a statement insisting it could see no evidence of a problem. “Reports of blood clots received so far are not greater than the number that would have occurred naturally in the vaccinated population,” said its lead on vaccine safety. “The safety of the public will always come first.”

A week later, on March 18, the MHRA said it was conducting a “further, ongoing review” into five reports in the UK of blood clots linked with lowered platelets. “A causal association with the vaccine has not been established,” said the MHRA, adding that its advice remained that the “benefits of vaccines against Covid-19 continue to outweigh any risks”.

But the concerns over the AstraZeneca vaccine inevitably reverberated in Whitehall.

Sir John Bell contacted Lord Bethell on March 26 to tell him about worries in the AstraZeneca camp and allegations of briefings against the AZ vaccine from Europe and the US. What’s more, there were worries that the Foreign Office was about to do the same.

Lord Bethell then told Mr Hancock: “He [Bell] says they are now really frazzled. Briefings from all corners, first DC [Washington], now Bx [Brussels]. They’re worried that they might be thrown under the bus by FCDO [Foreign Office]. They accept that their comms are a bit clunky, and they misjudged some things like clinical trials data and manufacturing, partly because they’ve not done a vaccine before. But they’re feeling at the end of their tether. Need a big hug: you are our national champion…”

Sir John, contacted last week, said he could not recall why the Foreign Office might have raised concerns. AstraZeneca has pointed out it had distributed 180 million doses of an intra-nasal flu vaccine that first received approval 20 years ago.

Four days later, on March 30 2021, German health officials announced that AstraZeneca would not be administered routinely to the under-60s. Canada had earlier suspended it for under-55s.

The WhatsApp messages show that the MHRA was considering changing its advice on AstraZeneca vaccine at the end of March. It would take another week to do so. In messages between Mr Hancock and Dan Rosenfield, Mr Johnson’s chief of staff, Mr Hancock sent a message at 6.10pm: “Pls call urgent,” adding four minutes later: “MHRA are threatening to change advice on AZ. Have spoken to June [Dame June Raine MHRA chief executive]. No decision until tmrw but I think the boss needs to know.”

On April 7, after the MHRA had received 79 reports in the UK of blood clotting cases alongside low platelet levels, the JCVI advised the Government to offer an alternative vaccine to AstraZeneca for the under-30s. It would raise the age limit on May 7, a month later, to the under-40s.

Prof Dingwall, a professor of sociology who sat on the JCVI, told The Telegraph: “It isn’t that there was a slow response but that it wasn’t as quick as it would have been had we been a member of the European Medicines Agency. Both the UK and Europeans were looking at the same data. The Europeans simply processed it a bit more quickly.”

Prof Dingwall, a prominent critic of Covid-19 jabs for children, was removed from the JCVI sub-committee on Covid in August 2021. Looking back now, he retains confidence in the AZ vaccine. “There were not many deaths but there were enough for the JCVI to move its recommendations away from the AstraZeneca vaccine to Moderna and others. The other family of vaccines appeared to have fewer risks associated with them. It wasn’t like there was a massive extra risk or massive excess deaths. [But] there was a safety signal that suggested AstraZeneca was a bit riskier than other vaccines.”

8. AstraZeneca vaccine reaches the end of its UK road

On June 26 2021, Mr Hancock fell on his sword, resigning as health secretary in the wake of his affair with his closest aide, their kiss caught on camera and seemingly in breach of his own Covid-19 rules.

At that moment, reckons Sir John Bell, AstraZeneca lost its greatest champion inside Government. In February 2021, deliveries of vaccines in the UK were evenly split between AstraZeneca and Pfizer. But by September 2021, Airfinity, the disease forecasting firm, reckoned that 92 per cent of the doses arriving in the UK were being provided by Pfizer.

The JCVI selected Pfizer and Moderna as the preferred vaccines for the UK’s booster campaign for that winter. AstraZeneca could be used for people who were unable to have the mRNA vaccines. Then in August last year, AstraZeneca was dropped by the UK altogether.

“It was a fantastic vaccine, and it still is a fantastic vaccine for the world … and the population which received AstraZeneca vaccines of course got very good protection from it,” Prof Anthony Harnden, the deputy chairman of the JCVI, told the BBC.

“Matt [Hancock] was a massive advocate for it [AstraZeneca],” said Sir John. “Matt was a very big champion and he would have had a very different view in that job at the time the decisions were made.”

Sir John laments the vaccine’s passing. “It is an asteroid-like risk from the AstraZeneca vaccine,” he told The Telegraph, “There is a risk of getting hit by an asteroid but it isn’t very big.”

He is upset that in quietly dropping the vaccine, ministers did not sing its praises. “It would have been nice if they had been a bit more courteous about what we had done for them,” said Sir John. “We didn’t go into this except to save as many lives as we did.”

Mr Hancock remains an ardent supporter of the vaccine and the rollout that was the quickest of the world’s major countries.

In a statement to The Telegraph, he said: “What the whole record shows is an incredibly successful vaccination effort that saved many lives in the UK and around the world. Multiple reports from deeply credible institutions have found that the science, rollout and pharmacovigilance of the UK vaccine rollout was exceptional.”

By November 2022, 40.5 million people in the UK received a third dose of Covid vaccine. Of those just 58,700 doses were from AstraZeneca. By comparison, in its first year of rollout, AstraZeneca had supplied almost 50 million doses in the UK.

AstraZeneca had hinted at solving the problem of the blood clots. Sir Menelas Pangalos, the executive vice-president for research and development, said the company was hoping to tweak its recipe to avoid the issue, according to a report in The Economist magazine, before adding that there was “little to no” evidence of such adverse events outside the West.

The Economist quoted him saying: “It may be driven by genetics, it may be driven by overreporting, who knows?” The Guardian subsequently reported any plan to fix the alleged problem had been abandoned because AZ could still not figure out the cause. “This being the case we are not at this time looking to modify the vaccine,” a spokesman said in March 2022.

Asked last year if his company could have managed the process better, Sir Pascal Soriot declared: “It is really hard to regret anything when you have delivered 2.6 billion doses of vaccine, saved one million lives around the world and enabled economies in many countries to restart.”

Dame Sarah has denied the Oxford vaccine was rolled out too quickly. “Every single thing we normally do when developing a vaccine was done, it was just that we worked very hard to cut out all delays in that process,” she said last June.

For tens of millions the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was a brilliant discovery that saved lives and pulled the UK out of a never-ending cycle of lockdowns. For the unlucky few, however, it was a terrifying, earth-shattering catastrophe. Their ordeal is ongoing; their nightmare unending.

Listen to ‘The Forgotten Victims’, a new episode of The Lockdown Files podcast, using the audio player in this article, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-astrazeneca-vaccine/