AstraZeneca Lowers Efficacy Claim for COVID-19 Vaccine, a Bit, After Board's Rebuke

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

AstraZeneca lowers efficacy claim for COVID-19 vaccine, a bit, after board's rebuke:

Seeking to quell a controversy of its own making, AstraZeneca yesterday issued new data from the latest clinical trial of its COVID-19 vaccine, slightly downgrading its previous estimate of how well the shots protect people from symptomatic disease. The update came after an extraordinary rebuke issued late Monday night by the study's independent monitoring board, which complained that the company had used potentially misleading and "outdated" data in its initial analysis.

The two-dose vaccine, made by AstraZeneca with technology developed by the University of Oxford, had 76% efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19 among the 32,000 trial participants in the United States and South America, the company stated in a press release distributed late last night. That's 3% lower than AstraZeneca reported in a press release on 22 March. The new analysis is based on 190 COVID-19 cases that occurred in people who had received the vaccine or a placebo; the previous one evaluated 141 cases, which AstraZeneca says was a pre-specified cutoff point for an interim analysis.

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