Thank you very much for having me today to provide a few brief remarks about AstraZeneca's role in fighting COVID-19.
In the face of the greatest health emergency in our generation, I'm incredibly proud of the role that AstraZeneca and our employees are playing to defeat the pandemic and to positively contribute to global public health.
The pandemic has never really respected boundaries or borders. It has represented an unprecedented global health and economic challenge. Because of this, at a very early stage in the crisis, AstraZeneca joined forces with the University of Oxford to bring together their world-class expertise in vaccinology with our global development manufacturing capabilities.
From the outset of this partnership, AstraZeneca committed to providing broad and equitable access to our vaccine and to making it available at no profit through the height of the crisis. I think this reflects our commitment to meet the urgent global public health need that we felt and to support health systems and economies recovering from the global outbreak.
In recognizing the complexity of vaccine manufacturing and the critical importance of the global supply chain, AstraZeneca helped establish manufacturing capacity in 15 countries at 25 different manufacturing sites to supply the vaccine in every region of the world as quickly as possible. This required us to rely on our own manufacturing capacity and to share our know-how with more than 20 partners, each of which is now fully equipped to supply the vaccine and contribute to our total output.
In support of global efforts to guarantee rapid, fair and equitable access to vaccines for people in all countries, AstraZeneca was the first biopharmaceutical company to join the COVAX partnership. In 2021, AstraZeneca together with our global partners supplied more than 2.6 billion vaccine doses to over 180 countries across every continent, including here in Canada. Approximately two-thirds of the supply went to low- and middle-income countries. More than 300 million doses have been delivered to 130 countries through COVAX.
Since early 2020, when the true scale of the pandemic became clear, AstraZeneca has committed to helping defeat COVID-19 by harnessing and sharing our scientific knowledge and expertise to advance the development of potential medicines to prevent or treat the virus. As you know, our Vaxzevria vaccine has been a critical part of global efforts to defeat the pandemic. It received its first approval for emergency use in December 2020 and has been granted a marketing or emergency use authorization in 93 countries worldwide. That includes an emergency use listing by the WHO.
The vaccine has demonstrated efficacy against all known variants of COVID-19, including omicron. It is also effective against all severities of the disease, from asymptomatic to severe disease and hospitalization. It's generally well tolerated, according to clinical studies and real-world evidence from over 10 million patients globally. Over the course of 2021, it's estimated to have helped prevent 50 million COVID cases and five million hospitalizations and has saved more than one million lives.
Complementing our vaccine's approach, we also quickly mobilized our efforts to advance the development of Evusheld. It's a novel coronavirus-neutralizing long-acting antibody combination for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. Evusheld is actually the first long-acting antibody combination to demonstrate benefit in both prevention and treatment of COVID-19, as well as the first antibody therapy to have shown a high level of protection against symptomatic COVID in the pre-exposure prevention setting.
While the vaccine is helping us turn the tide of this devastating pandemic, millions of people around the world—about 2% of the population—remain at risk of COVID-19 because they're unable to mount a sufficient immune response following vaccination. These are patients and other people who are immunocompromised. They include people with blood cancers or other cancers being treated with chemotherapy, people on dialysis, those taking medications after organ transplant, or those who are on immunosuppressive therapies, including medicines for multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis.
In closing, I hope I have clearly demonstrated AstraZeneca's commitment to helping defeat COVID-19 from the very beginning of the global health crisis. Our commitment has not stopped. We remain focused on providing broad and equitable access to our vaccines and our other medicines.
AstraZeneca remains steadfast in our commitment to changing the course of this pandemic and helping ensure that those countries with the least means are able to protect their populations. This is a humanitarian challenge that we have, and it demands a global united response, not just from the scientific community but also from industries, organizations, governments and, really, every person around the globe. We are committed to continuing to play our part in this public health crisis.
Thank you.