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198 substances are in the corona vaccination process. Other companies hope to benefit from the test stop at AstraZeneca.
More than 170 research teams around the world compete for the first corona vaccine. As of Tuesday, the AstraZeneca vaccine was one of the most promising candidates – tens of thousands of tests were imminent. But on Wednesday there was a global test stop. One subject apparently showed serious side effects.
The test stop is routine, the company writes: “In large clinical studies, there can be random cases of disease. These must be examined independently. “
It is not unusual for a test of this type to have to be interrupted.
This is also the opinion of Jürg Utzinger, Director of the Swiss Institute of Public Health in Basel, who is preparing a trial of the Swiss crown vaccine. Such an interruption is part of a serious testing procedure. “It is not unusual for such a test to have to be interrupted,” he says. You must properly assess whether the side effects were related to the vaccine or not. The interruption meant a delay but not a prevention of the vaccine.
198 different substances are being applied for corona vaccination. According to data from the World Health Organization, 142 are in the preclinical phase, so they are still in development. 29 substances are in the first and 18 in the second phase of clinical trials. In the third phase, in which substances are tested in large groups, nine vaccines are listed, including the one from AstraZeneca. No one has been approved internationally yet.
However, just under a month ago, Russia approved its “Sputnik V” vaccine for wide use in the population, without having passed phase 3. The Russian vaccine is a mystery to the international research community: nothing was published about it in the relevant magazines.
«I am a doctor and I got vaccinated. I didn’t feel any side effects, ”says Andrey Shkoda, chief physician at Moscow’s Vorokhobov Hospital. Phase 3 vaccines began in Moscow on Wednesday. Across the country, 40,000 people will participate in the tests.
The race for the corona vaccine will also be decided in South America, which is increasingly becoming a testing laboratory. Most of the major manufacturers, including AstraZeneca, have their vaccines tested here, because there are a particularly large number of corona cases. Therefore, the test stop has caused big waves throughout South America.
The Chinese company Sinovac hopes to benefit from this. “We are in phase 3 of clinical trials,” says Liu Peicheng, a Sinovac media spokesman. Now it is a matter of testing the effectiveness of your own vaccine. Sinovac expects to complete testing and gain approval in key countries by the end of the year. “We hope that the vaccine is ready for use before the end of the year,” the spokesperson stressed.
When and who will be the first to reach the finish line in the race for the corona vaccine depends on large-scale testing in the coming weeks.
