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The regulator says testing of the vaccine will continue after death and does not provide further details.
Brazil’s National Health Surveillance Agency (ANVISA) said on Wednesday that a volunteer in a clinical trial of the COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford had died, but said the trial would continue.
It was not immediately clear whether the volunteer received the vaccine or the placebo.
The regulator said that while testing of the vaccine would continue, it did not provide further details about the volunteer’s death, citing medical confidentiality for those involved in the trials.
Oxford confirmed that it would continue testing.
“After careful evaluation of this case in Brazil, there have been no concerns about the safety of the clinical trial, and the independent review, in addition to the Brazilian regulator, has recommended that the trial continue,” the British university said in a statement.
The Federal University of Sao Paulo, which is helping coordinate phase three of the vaccine’s clinical trials in Brazil, said separately that the volunteer was Brazilian.
CNN Brazil reported that the volunteer was a 28-year-old man who lived in Rio de Janeiro and died of complications from COVID-19.
People line up in front of the Special Immunobiological Reference Center (CRIE) of the Federal University of Sao Paulo (Unifesp) where the Oxford / AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine trials are being carried out, [File: Amanda Perobelli/Reuters]
The Brazilian government already has plans to buy the vaccine and produce it at its Fiocruz biomedical research center in Rio de Janeiro, while the São Paulo state research center, Instituto Butantan, is testing a competitor vaccine from China’s Sinovac.
More than 155,000 people in Brazil have died from COVID-19, the second highest death toll in the world after the United States. Brazil has diagnosed almost 5.3 million cases of the virus, the third highest in the world after the United States and India.
The United States suspended trials of the UK-based AstraZeneca vaccine after a patient in the UK trial reported a serious illness, pending a review by the Food and Drug Administration. the United States (FDA).
Sources told the Reuters news agency on October 20 that the US trial could resume this week, after the FDA review is complete.
The FDA did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment on whether the death of the Brazilian volunteer would affect the resumption of the trial in the United States.
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