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The suspension of clinical trials of the vaccine being developed by the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca in conjunction with the University of Oxford was motivated by an inflammation in the spine of one of the volunteers, the executive director of the British company revealed today.
Speaking to Reuters, Pascal Soriot also said that by the end of the year it will be possible to know whether the vaccine under development is in fact effective against Covid-19 as clinical trials will resume shortly.
Possible side effect
AstraZeneca suspended the last phase of testing earlier this week after one of the volunteers suffered an adverse effect. The patient suffers from “Symptoms associated with rare inflammation of the spinal cord”.
Soriot said this diagnosis will be evaluated by an independent committee to determine whether the inflammation is indeed a side effect of the vaccine.
According to the official, it is very common to suspend tests during vaccine development.
“It is very common, in fact, and many experts will say so too … Stop, study, start over,” he explained.
WHO says safety is a priority in a vaccine
The safety of a possible vaccine for Covid-19 comes “first,” said World Health Organization chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan.
“Just because we talk about speed [no desenvolvimento da vacina] … does not mean that we are going to compromise [a segurança] or make shortcuts, “Soumya Swaminathan said at an event.
“The process has yet to follow the rules of the game. For drugs and vaccines that are administered to people, you need to prove safety first,” he guaranteed.
Laboratories around the world are racing against time to develop a vaccine against the new coronavirus. There are dozens of teams testing various candidate vaccines, some more advanced and promising, but scientists caution that none should be ready before the end of this year or even next.
According to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (which has a graph showing the progress of the experiments) there are 239 projects and 8 are in the clinical trial phase, which consists of inoculating the vaccine in thousands of volunteers to determine if it really prevents infection.
Despite the now-suspended clinical trial, the project between Oxford University and AstraZeneca is one of the most promising, to which Pfizer and BioNTech, gives Modern and various Chinese projects, namely the CanSinoBIO who has already obtained authorization to administer the vaccine to Chinese military personnel.
The General Directorate of Health (DGS) announced on Wednesday the existence of 1,849 deaths and 61,541 cases of Covid-19 in Portugal since the start of the pandemic.
The death toll rose from 1,846 to 1849, three more than on Tuesday, two in the Lisbon region and the Tagus valley and one in the north.
The number of infected people rose from 60,895 to 61,541, another 646, the highest number of new infections recorded since April 20.
35,151 contacts remain under surveillance, 685 more than Tuesday.
The pandemic has already caused more than 900 thousand deaths worldwide
The pandemic caused by the new coronavirus has killed more than 900,000 people around the world, according to a report by the French agency AFP.
Since the appearance of the first cases in China in December, there have been a total of 900,052 deaths worldwide and 27,711,866 reported cases. Latin America and the Caribbean are the most affected regions, with 300,340 deaths, ahead of Europe (219,616).
More than half of the deaths from covid-19 worldwide were registered in four countries: the United States (190,478), Brazil (127,464), India (73,890) and Mexico (68,484).
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