Serious Warning About Vaccines: Volunteers Dies In AstraZeneca And Oxford Clinical Examinations

Photo illustration (Source: AstraZeneca)

JAKARTA - Brazilian health authority, Anvisa announced the death of a volunteer in the clinical trial of the COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford. Even so, the University of Oxford said the trial would continue.

Quoted by Reuters on Thursday, 22 October, Oxford confirmed plans to continue testing. In a statement, they said they had made a careful assessment. There are no concerns about the safety of the clinical trials.

The Federal University of Sao Paulo, which helps coordinate phase III clinical trials in Brazil, also suggested that testing should continue. Meanwhile, AstraZeneca declined to comment.

The volunteer who died was a 28-year-old man living in Rio de Janeiro. He died of complications from COVID-19. Anvisa did not provide further details. They said the information was the medical confidentiality of those involved in the trial.

"Everything went as expected, with no record of serious vaccine-related complications involving participating volunteers," the Federal University of Sao Paulo said in a statement. After the incident, AstraZeneca's shares fell 1.8 percent.

So far, eight thousand of the 10 thousand volunteers planned for the trial have been recruited and given the first dose in six Brazilian cities. Many of the volunteers have received the second injection, said a university spokesman.

Problems in July

The AstraZeneca vaccine continues to be tested on tens of thousands of volunteers around the world. But the recent obituaries were the detrimental announcements of phase III trials. In July, AstraZeneca conducted a temporary suspension of its clinical trials to conduct a safety review for a volunteer with a symptom.

The volunteers' condition was not announced, until AstraZeneca wrote an email to CNN that the volunteer had an "undiagnosed case of multiplesclerosis." The independent panel concluded that the condition was "not vaccine related."

Then, in September, AstraZeneca announced that it had stopped global trials of the COVID-19 vaccine due to illness in other volunteers. AstraZeneca's US Phase 3 trials began on August 31, before later trials were suspended on September 8.

The Brazilian federal government has plans to buy British vaccines and produce them at the FioCruz biomedical research center in Rio de Janeiro. Meanwhile, a competitor vaccine from China, Sinovac Biotech Ltd SVA.O is being tested by the Sao Paulo Butantan Institute state research center. But Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said the federal government would not buy the Sinovac vaccine.

Brazil has the second-deadliest COVID-19 outbreak, after the United States. It is known that there are 154,000 in Brazil who died from COVID-19. Meanwhile, Brazil is in third place in the world with more than 5.2 million cases, after the United States and India.