It's Wednesday, March. I'm Oscar Ramirez from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America from good news to questions and concerns. Astra Zeneca released details from its US trials that they're vaccine is seventy effective against COVID nineteen. Then hours later, federal officials said that they might have used outdated information and was missing a
month's worth of data, another misstep in the rollout. Karen Wine, trial health reporter at USA Today, joins us for the latest. Thanks for joining us, Karen Sure, Karen, I'm glad we can get you back on so we can follow this story of astra Zeneca. So we spoke on Monday about the good news from aster Zeneca. Their news out of their clinical trials in the US said that their vaccine was seventy nine effective against symptomatic cases of COVID, a
hundred percent effective against severe cases, and prevented hospitalization. So it's all very good news. And then very early Tuesday a morning, we got some new news that they might have been using outdated information, and this kind of called into question what the true efficacy is. I know astra Zeneca has had some other problems in the past a little bit, so now there's a lot more questions than we had before. So Karen, help us walk through what
the update is. I wish I could tell you more about. We actually don't know what the new data is. They've promised it within the next forty eight hours. That was this morning, so maybe we will talk again on another day or two. But it has raised questions about that efficacy figure. And the issue is in the last month there have likely been more people in the trial infected.
We don't know how many were in the vaccine arm versus the placebo arm, and therefore how effective the vaccine has been at preventing any symptomatic COVID disease or severe disease people hospitalize, that sort of thing. This is coming from the Data Safety Monitoring Board, so they look they're an independent group, you know. They said that they were
concerned about that outdated data. Dr Anthony Fauci weighed in on all of this and said, it's kind of a shame that that happened, but this is also one of those safeguards. This is why we have all these independent boards, and this kind of shows that the system is working. People should feel better about the vaccine, I guess, but it does raise questions about why they released the information they did. Obviously, the more up to date information will becoming.
They did qualify it as interim data, but they didn't specify that it was as of February seventeenth and not the current data. So it raises questions that didn't need to be raised. I guess is the best way to put it, and that's the discussion now right. So Dr Anthony Fauci put it as a safeguard, UH saying that this was a safeguard. There's a lot of other experts saying, well, you know, this raises all those unwanted questions. Could it
undermine the vaccine? Could it pose more hesitancy to the vaccine. Astra Zeneca, for their part, already had a few missteps throughout their whole process. A lot of this happening in Europe. You know, we talked about the blood clots yesterday. France is another example when they said it's not effective for
older people. Backtrack then the blood clout thing, and you know, so that they've had all these missteps throughout the way, you could look at it as a sign that all the other companies are doing incredibly well that they have not made these kinds of missteps. But yes, it does seem like there's a cloud over this particular vaccine with a number of problems even dating back to September. And then tell me a little bit about you know, the
promise or astros nic. They were it was going to be one of the cheapest and easiest to distribute, So a lot of developing countries were looking at this vaccine as something that they could be using. Just tell me a little bit about how that figured into the whole picture of vaccine distribution. Sure, well, this one was considered the front runner. Last year. The US government bought three hundred million doses of this vaccine while it bought a hundred million of others, because it saw it as the
most promising vaccine. And again, it's easier to distribute, It doesn't need to be kept in a freezer. It can be distributed along the normal chain of vaccine distribution, and it's relatively inexpensive. So it was thought that this would be the answer for rural areas, for countries that don't have a strong infrastructure of freezers and that sort of thing. So it really has had been seen as the potential savior of the developing world in terms of vaccination, and
hopefully it still will be. This is not as Dr Fauci said this morning, this is probably still this is still a very good vaccine. We haven't seen all the data yet, but hopefully it will confirm it. In terms of older people the UK or in Europe, there were questions raised about whether the vaccine would be effective in older people because it wasn't tested very much in older
people there. It was included. Older people were included in the study in the US and again according to data they released yesterday, so we don't know if this needs to be updated, but it was effective among those over sixty five, so it appeared to be extremely effective even in older people. I mean, we'll have to wait for that data obviously. My sense is that it will still come back safe and effective at a pretty decent number. But you know where that number lies is what's going
to be the interesting part. And just talking about those misteps that have happened so far across the pond, you know, in Europe, in Norway, in places like Romania, they're saying that people are rejecting it. They had all these sites set up and appointments that got canceled. People just flat out saying they don't want it. So, you know, I hope it doesn't really bog them down too much, you know, this kind of reporting error, you know, failing to disclose
all of the information. That way, it's probably still going to be safe, but we'll have to see what happens there. As someone told me off the record this morning, it's still probably a very good vaccine. The problem maybe at the management level. The jury is still out. Karen Wintrild, health reporter at USA Today, Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't forget the effort.
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