As the patriotic hype wanes, the Oxford vaccine looks less persuasive

If a week is a long time in politics, it is even longer in the process of public reception of a Covid-19 vaccine. This week began with much dancing in the streets to celebrate the arrival of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine; since then, it has been downhill all the way for this great British invention.

From the start, there was something a trifle forced about the laudatory reception accorded to the vaccine, something decidedly chauvinistic. After the triumphant announcements from an American and a German-American initiative of successful vaccine developments, here was a British contender that could knock the socks off any competition. The acclaim was reminiscent of 1950s Pathe newsreels hailing a new development in widget technology (“And it’s all British-made too!”).

The first damper was put on the proceedings by the markets, with AstraZeneca’s shares down 3.81 per cent by Monday afternoon – a slump of £4bn in the company’s value. Investors were unimpressed by a headline efficacy rate of 70.4 per cent, while Pfizer and Moderna were both claiming 95 per cent effectiveness. Oxford/AstraZeneca’s attempt to achieve parity by insisting their vaccine gave 90 per cent protection if administered first in a half dose, followed by a full dose, did their cause more harm than good.

The revelation that this puzzling phenomenon had been discovered by accident, when people in a sub-set of volunteers had been given half doses by mistake, did not inspire confidence in the experiment or its outcome. When it transpired that nobody in the sub-group that achieved 90 per cent immunity was over age 55, scepticism set in on a grand scale. “Accident”, “mistake” and “error” are not terms that encourage the public to accept a vaccine.

Granted, many significant scientific discoveries have been made by accident – that is part of the exploratory process in any laboratory – but what Oxford/AstraZeneca was reporting looked like human error, not serendipitous discovery. An American commentator’s forecast that the United States would never license this vaccine dealt a further blow to morale.

A spokesperson from AstraZeneca has since told the BBC that further investigations will be carried out to better establish the efficacy of different dosing regimens.

This triumph-turned-debacle has all the hallmarks of a project gone public prematurely. Whether it was an attempt to stay on a level footing with Pfizer in America and BioNTech in Germany, manufacturers of the leading rival vaccines, or under prodding from the government to give the locked-down British public an injection of optimism, the Oxford/AstraZeneca announcement seems to have gone off at half-cock. That could have serious consequences: public confidence in this vaccine may have been  undermined.

Announcing the development in a press release rather than in a peer-reviewed, fully detailed research paper simply adds to the impression of haste and confusion, almost of amateurishness. But, from the beginning, the Oxford/AstraZeneca project also needlessly made itself vulnerable to ethical objections by employing the HEK 293 cell-line in propagating the virus used to develop the vaccine. Since this cell-line derives from the kidney of a baby girl aborted in the Netherlands in the 1970s, some people have already stated, on ethical grounds, they could not accept this vaccine.

That is purely an ethical standpoint – since pro-life people regard abortion as murder, they believe benefiting from organ harvesting of an aborted child, however remotely, would make them accessories after the fact – it has nothing to do with the “anti-vaxxer” campaign: most of the people morally objecting to the Oxford vaccine have been stuck like pincushions with many other inoculations.

Only four others among the top twenty competing vaccine initiatives have employed this controversial technique. Commercially, Oxford’s use of HEK 293 is a serious own-goal for marketing in America, where the pro-life movement is strong and the Catholic bishops’ conference has already demanded ethical vaccine manufacture.

The two rival vaccines are ethically unobjectionable and, it begins to appear, may be clinically more effective. After a week’s scrutiny of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, the original hype seems exaggerated. Sceptics will wonder if it has a lot to do with the fact that Boris Johnson has ordered 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine, but only 30 million shots from Pfizer and five million from Moderna.

It could be that, in clinical terms, Oxford/AstraZeneca will recover from this stumble, refine its research and secure regulatory approval. Clinically, that is; but that would only be half the battle. The “anti-vaxxer” movement remains very much a minority, but when so-called herd immunity is an objective, in the event that vaccines turn out to afford only a modicum of protection, that minority becomes disproportionately significant.

Beyond that, the pandemic has generated a second category of vaccine sceptics – not anti-vaxxers, as such, but concerned consumers. YouGov has discovered, for example, that only 67 per cent of people would be willing to accept the Pfizer vaccine. As that figure shows, anti-vaccine resistance is unprecedentedly high at this moment. It is not always dogmatic or ideological, just distrustful. Parts of the public, which yelled for a vaccine to be developed as fast as possible, now distrust vaccines produced at high speed, in response to that demand, as possibly inadequately monitored and dangerous.

In this climate, the apparently fumbling approach of Oxford/AstraZeneca is calculated to make the product suspect in the eyes of consumers. The very fact that Boris has 100 million shots stashed in his lock-up will confirm the suspicion that it is being pushed by the government and that it is considered appropriate for the plebs, at £2.23 a shot (AstraZeneca has made a no-profit pledge), while Pfizer (£29.47 for two jabs) and Moderna (£23.99-£27.74) are the preferred prophylactics of the well-heeled.

The British public is in an erratic mood. Stir-crazy from lockdown and suspicious of authority as never before, it will take an extremely critical and fastidious attitude towards any substance proposed to be pumped into its body. In that context, the dysfunctional presentation of Britain’s entry in the international vaccine stakes may permanently have damaged its prospects.