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(Adds IRBM's, background)
By Elvira Pollina and Emilio Parodi
MILAN, Nov 24 (Reuters) - Italy will get 16 million shots of
the potential COVID-19 vaccine developed by British drugmaker
AstraZeneca in the first months of 2021 under a supply deal
agreed at a European Union level, a government source said.
This initial supply will immunize 8 million people as the
AstraZeneca vaccine will require an initial shot
followed by a booster, the source told Reuters on Tuesday.
"Italy will receive 4 million shots as early as January and
it will receive a further 12 million within the following three
months", the source said, cautioning that this timing was
subject to approval of the AstraZeneca and University of Oxford
developed vaccine by the European Medicine Authority.
Rome has already booked a total of 70 million doses and
Italian biotech firm IRBM, which is cooperating with AstraZeneca
in developing the vaccine, told Reuters all of the shots will be
delivered by mid-2021.
"IRBM aims to distribute a first tranche of 2-3 million
doses, already produced, as soon as there will be validation by
the regulatory authorities, whether in December or January," the
group's managing director Matteo Liguori told Reuters.
Liguori added that IRBM has been ready to go for some time,
having stocked up in advance on required functional material,
such as vials and reagents, and had increased its equipment and
instruments in order to triple their production capacity.
Italy, the first Western country to be hit by the pandemic,
became the sixth in the world to surpass 50,000 coronavirus
related deaths on Monday, and second in Europe after Britain.
The doses from AstraZeneca are in addition to the initial
3.4 million Italy is due to receive from Pfizer and its
partner BioNTech, which are also expected as early as
January.
Under the EU supply agreement, Italy will receive a total of
27 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, or 13.6% of the 200
million initially purchased by Europe.
AstraZeneca said on Monday its vaccine on average prevented
70% of COVID-19 cases in late-stage trials. This rose to 90% in
a group of participants who accidentally received a half dose
followed by a full dose.
AstraZeneca said it will have as many as 200 million doses
by the end of 2020, around four times as many as U.S. competitor
Pfizer. And it said 700 million doses could be ready globally as
soon as the end of the first quarter of 2021.
The EU has secured up to 400 million doses of AstraZeneca's
experimental vaccine.
(Reporting by Elvira Pollina and Emilio Parodi;
Editing by Alexander Smith)
