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Cold shower for the anti-Covid vaccine Johnson and Johnson, which “temporarily stopped” the tests it was running on a sample of 60,000 patients after a clinical trial participant contracted an unexplained disease. This is the second interruption of clinical trials of the vaccine after the one received by competitor Astrazeneca.
The company has ensured that the side effect is being evaluated by the Independent Data Security Oversight Board and its internal experts, and has ensured that it will provide more information after further investigation. “We are committed to providing transparent updates during the clinical development process of our candidate vaccine,” said J&J, explaining that this type of inconvenience is “expected” in any clinical trial.
Although the suspension of a vaccine is a normal phenomenon in any clinical trial, on the other hand, Covid vaccine research has been over-compressed over time due to “political” pressure to act soon. In fact, the economic repercussions of the pandemic will be mitigated once the vaccine is produced and distributed on a large scale.
The J&J impasse is not the first in the race to find the vaccine. Even the British pharmaceutical company AstraZenecarecently temporarily suspended testing in the US after a patient experienced side effects. The study, which remains suspended in the United States, has already been resumed in other countries.
Doubts about immunity
As if that were not enough, doubts about possible immunity to vaccines are also growing, considering the cases of people who have fallen ill twice. The latest case comes from the US, as reported by theAnsa.
A 25-year-old from Nevada fell ill with Covid-19 twice in a few months, and the second time with more severe symptoms. The case has been the subject of study and an article in The Lancet, picked up by the BBC, raises questions about the immunity of infected patients cured, even if cases of double infection remain rare. And it also suggests caution to those who have already left Covid once. The 25-year-old American, who had no known health problems or immune defects that made him particularly vulnerable to Covid, showed the first symptoms, not too severe, on March 25: sore throat, cough, headache, nausea and diarrhea.
On April 18 he tested positive for the first time. On the 27th he had no more symptoms and in the two tests carried out on May 9 and 26, he was negative. The symptoms, however, reappeared on May 28. On June 5, he tested positive again with severe respiratory symptoms that required hospitalization. The scientists say it could not have been a recurrence of the first infection: a comparison of the genetic codes of the viruses analyzed on the two occasions showed that they were too different to be caused by the same infection.
“Our results indicate that contagion does not necessarily protect against future infections,” said Dr. Mark Pandori of the University of Nevada. Double infections occurred in Hong Kong, Belgium and the Netherlands, but the second was never more serious. It happened in Ecuador, where, however, the patient did not reach hospitalization. “It is too early to say with certainty what the implications of these findings are for any immunization program,” said another physician involved in the research. But they confirm the fact that we still don’t know enough about the immune response to this virus. “
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