The CEO of AstraZeneca, one of several pharmaceutical corporations testing vaccines for COVID-19, told investors in a personal call Wednesday morning that the company’s Phase 3 vaccine trials were discontinued Tuesday after ‘a woman in the trial developed neurological symptoms, according to STAT News.
Company officials announced Tuesday that they would postpone all international trials of AZD1222, the COVID-19 vaccine developed through the University of Oxford, after a user participating in the Phase 3 trials in the UK fell ill without Explanation. He noted that diseases occur through possibility in giant clinical trials and that such a pause is not unusual “as long as there is potentially unexplained disease. “
AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said Wednesday that a woman developed symptoms that appeared to be consistent with transverse myelitis, STAT News reported. Symptoms of the disorder, which is caused by inflammation of the spinal cord, come with weakness in the arms or legs with sensory symptoms such as numbness or tingling, pain, and disorders of the bladder or intestines, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Until Wednesday, the woman’s diagnosis had not yet been confirmed, according to STAT News. Soriot said the woman’s condition is improving and that she will soon leave the hospital, the news site reported.
Tuesday’s hiatus was not the first for AZD1222 clinical trials. Soriot said the trials were suspended in July after a user developed neurological symptoms, but resumed after the user was diagnosed with unrelated sclerosis, according to STAT News.
AstraZeneca officials began phase 3 clinical trials of their candidate vaccine in the United States late last month. The trial was to come with up to 30,000 adults from racial, ethnic and geographic groups.
Two other candidate vaccines began the last tests this summer on tens of thousands of people in the United States: one created through the National Institutes of Health and manufactured through Moderna Inc. , and the other evolved through Pfizer Inc. BioNTech in Germany.
U. S. fitness officials are in the process of being able to do so. But it’s not the first time They said they expect to see a COVID-19 vaccine until the end of the year.
The United States leads the world with the maximum number of coronavirus cases and the death toll. Since the start of the pandemic, the government has shown more than 6. 3 million infections and reported more than 189,000 deaths nationwide, according to figures compiled through Johns Hopkins.
On Wednesday, more than 27. 6 million cases of COVID-19 were reported internationally and more than 898,000 people died from a viral infection, according to Johns Hopkins.
The Associated Press contributed to the report.
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