AstraZeneca‘s Covid vaccine, developed by scientists from the prestigious Oxford University, was meant to be a post-Brexit success story.
Not only was it supposed to be a shining example of British ingenuity which would banish the devastating Covid pandemic and sentence lockdowns to history, it was also meant to demonstrate the UK’s generosity in the global crisis, with the jab sold at cost, not for profit.
Ministers were so confident in its success that then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock privately labelled it the ‘new Mini’, a symbol of a revitalised Britain’s place as a world leader.
The pharmaceutical giant’s decision to forego massive profits, and instead deliver jabs for the cost of a cup of coffee, even prompted the World Health Organization to label it a ‘vaccine for the world’.
But in just a few short years, the vaccine has become a pariah, dragged through the courts by the families of those it has allegedly killed and maimed through a rare side effect missed in the original clinical trials.
If successful, it will be the British taxpayer that foots the bill, which lawyers have estimated could amount to upwards of £250million under a deal struck between the pharma giant and ministers in the darkest days of the Covid lockdown.
The deal was to shield jab makers from the risk of being sued for any extremely rare adverse side effects missed in clinical trials to ensure the vaccines could be rolled out in the UK as soon as possible.
AstraZeneca is now withdrawing the vaccine from markets completely.
Despite the resulting panic over the landmark decision, experts today insisted that, overall, AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine is a safe and effective jab which undoubtedly saved millions of lives in Britain and around the world.
In fact, Professor Paul Hunter, a world-renowned expert in infectious diseases from the University of East Anglia, said the AstraZeneca jab had made a ‘really valuable contribution to reducing the mortality and disease from Covid’.