A Brazilian volunteer in a coronavirus vaccine trial of AstraZeneca died last week, the country’s health ministry disclosed on Wednesday, ...
A Brazilian volunteer in a coronavirus vaccine trial of AstraZeneca died last week, the country’s health ministry disclosed on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Brazil, however, said that the trial of the vaccine – developed by the pharmaceutical firm and Oxford University – would continue.
The country’s health agency Anvisa said that an international safety board monitoring the vaccine study gave notice of the death earlier this week, but the International Evaluation and Security Committee recommended that the trial continue, according to CNN.
It was unclear whether the volunteer received the experimental vaccine or a placebo, but experts said that if a volunteer had died after receiving the experimental vaccine, the company would have halted the trial over safety concerns. A Brazilian newspaper, O Globo, reported that the man had died of the coronavirus.
But Gustavo Mendes, a manager at Anvisa, told the The New York Times that an assessment by the independent safety board showed the volunteer’s death was not related to the vaccine. “The death outcome in a Covid-19 clinical study is what we call an expected outcome because Covid can cause death,” he said. Mendes said the decision to not halt the study was taken by Anvisa along with its United Kingdom counterpart.
Oxford, too, confirmed the plan to keep testing, saying that...
