Not great vaccine news

[notevenat20]

The Oxford vaccine trial, which I had been pinning my hopes on, has been suspended

www.statnews.com/2020/09/08/astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine-study-put-on-hold-due-to-suspected-adverse-reaction-in-participant-in-the-u-k/

;(

Yes I saw that. The vaccine talk has been rather exaggerated, by our foolish PM in particular, and lots of issues do crop up during trials. Maybe it'll come good.

Don't pin all your hopes on that, there are lots of vaccine candidates and also really good treatment will help get us in better shape.

www.statnews.com/feature/coronavirus/drugs-vaccines-tracker/ seems a good page for the latest potential drug treatment news.

Routine suspension due to an illness in one of the recipients. Very common in trials, it’s happened before with this one. They are hoping to restart in a few days.

This is completely normal in vaccine testing. If anyone gets ill, they stop to find out what’s happening. But the illness may be nothing at all to do with the vaccine, so then they carry on as normal. It’s good that they’re checking, though. But from what I’ve understood from following AZ, they’ve tested more people in Brazil and poss the US if that’s gone ahead, than the U.K., so if this is one person, it could be a random happening like an unrelated illness. I still have faith in them getting a safe vaccine out.

What does it in fact mean for the UK trial where I thought all the participants had already been vaccinated?

I think this is common in vaccine trials/drug trials it’s just they normally aren’t as high profiles as this and you would only find out about it if you knew where to look. It’s likely to be paused for a short time to look independently at the data surrounding the affected person. Here’s hoping the affected person makes a full recovery and reasons to adverse reactions are fully understood. That’s why a vaccine however desperately we want it can’t be rushed and stages jumped because “we think it’s safe”

Would they have checked if the ill person had been given the placebo before suspending the trial? Or might the person be on the placebo and be suffering from coronavirus?