By Chathushka Perera
London, UK (CWBN)_ According to reports made by the Brazilian National Health Surveillance Agency a volunteer participating in the AstraZeneca-Oxford Covid-19 vaccine trial, has died. The volunteer was a 28 year old, male resident of Rio de Janeiro and his death amounts to the third incident that has occurred in the course of the vaccine’s trail process.
While it remains unclear whether the volunteer had received the placebo or the vaccine, AstraZeneca has maintained that the death was unrelated to the trial and that the volunteer died out of Covid-19 complications. Hence the trials would proceed uninterrupted.
Since the Chinese Government published the genome sequence of the Covid-19 virus in January, government organisations, companies and other interest groups worldwide, initiated the rapid development of various vaccines. AstraZeneca together with the University of Oxford were among the forerunners who began Phase III trials, in the UK, US, South Africa, India and Brazil, having concluded the former phases of the trial with great success.
However, neurological complications began to arise in the course of the Phase III trial. The first two incidents were both reported from the UK with two women being diagnosed with transverse myelitis, an inflammatory condition that affects the spinal cord. It resulted in the suspension of AstraZeneca’s global trials. The multinational pharmaceutical company based in the UK, released a statement saying that the cases reported in the UK were unrelated to the vaccine on the 11th of September, just prior to commencing the trials again.
Nonetheless, Phase III trials in the US have been put on hold, indefinitely, especially owing to the company’s reluctance to provide adequate details regarding the complications that have arisen with the trial.
According the recent statistics, the US, India, Brazil, Russia and Spain are among the worst hit by the pandemic thus far. With demands growing exponentially, as the pandemic continues to ravage communities throughout the globe, so does the potential revenue a successful manufacturer is likely to make in the first months or perhaps years in the market. Hence experts and medical professionals remain sceptical over the developments.
