After an American health watchdog questioned encouraging test results of AstraZeneca’s corona vaccine, the British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant promises to come up with new data ‘within 48 hours’.
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The British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has a new fire to put out. An American health watchdog is questioning the latest American clinical study of AstraZeneca, of which the promising results were published on Monday. According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), whose Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) monitors clinical trials, AstraZeneca may have included outdated data in the study.
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We plan to share the most recent test data within 48 hours.
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In an exceptional statement that the institute published shortly after midnight on Tuesday, it sounds that ‘they can give an incomplete picture of the efficacy of the vaccine’. The institute urges AstraZeneca “to disclose the most accurate and accurate data as soon as possible.”
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The pharmaceutical company soon issued a statement on Tuesday. AstraZeneca emphasizes that it will share its latest test data with the DSMB. “We plan to do that within 48 hours,” it sounds.
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The NIAID announcement came just hours after AstraZeneca published the results of its largest study to date. The tests on some 32,000 volunteers in the US, Chile and Peru showed that the vaccine protects 79 percent against covid symptoms and 100 percent against serious disease. That is true also for people over 65, of whom a sufficient number of volunteers were included in the study this time.
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Brittle confidence
NIAID’s doubts may delay US approval of the AstraZeneca vaccine, although the impact on the US vaccination campaign appears limited. The vaccine was not expected to hit the US market until May at the earliest, and by then the US authorities will likely have enough vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson to vaccinate the entire adult population.
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