Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc (INO)

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The questions continue to pour in for AstraZeneca and Oxford’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate, after OWS chief Moncef Slaoui said Tuesday there was an age difference in the groups receiving the half-dose, then full-dose regimen and those getting two full-dose shots.

Patients in that half-then-full dose cohort, which showed the highest efficacy rate in the study at 90%, had an age cap of 55 years old, Business Insider reported. The full study had an average 70% efficacy, AstraZeneca said Monday, with patients who received two full doses clocking in at 62% efficacy.

Those numbers underwhelmed investors and analysts, as the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines both demonstrated 95% and 94.5% efficacy, the companies have respectively said. Jefferies’ Michael Yee summing up the sentiments: “We wonder which countries and populations would get the lower efficacy vaccine.”

AstraZeneca’s primary analysis was based on 11,636 volunteers from two trials conducted in the UK and Brazil. In total, there were 131 confirmed cases of Covid-19 — 30 in the vaccine group and 101 in the placebo arm.

Notably, the reason the half-full dosing regimen happened at all was due to a dosing error, per AstraZeneca’s R&D chief Mene Pangalos. Oxford researchers had begun administering the vaccine to volunteers before teaming up with the pharma company, and later “we found out that they had underpredicted the dose of the vaccine by half.” — Max Gelman