• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Covid-19 Vaccine race slows as patient falls ill after jab

Covid-19 vaccine

The world’s rush to find a vaccine for the deadly coronavirus is being slowed down after AstraZeneca Plc stopped giving shots of its experimental vaccine after a person participating in one of the company’s studies got sick.

This potential adverse reaction could delay or even derail efforts to speed an immunization against Covid-19, reports Bloomberg.

The pause stemmed from a standard review of the company’s vaccine trials after one person developed an unexplained illness, AstraZeneca said in a statement.

The move was intended to give researchers time to examine safety data while maintaining the integrity of the trials, the company said. The drugmaker’s shares fell as much as 3% in London Wednesday morning.

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The vaccine, which AstraZeneca is developing with researchers from the University of Oxford, has been viewed as one of the leading candidates.

The partners are aiming to enroll as many as 50,000 participants for late-stage trials that are underway in the U.K., the U.S., Brazil and South Africa, with others planned for Japan and Russia.

The decision to tap the brakes jolted investors in AstraZeneca, which has a market value of about $140 billion and has the largest weighting of all the companies in the U.K.’s FTSE-100 Index

The development has the potential to disrupt one of the most closely watched scientific sprints in history.

Companies have been working to find a vaccine in hopes of blunting a pandemic that has sickened more than 27 million people and killed over 894,000 worldwide.

Health officials in the U.S. and President Donald Trump have repeatedly said that it’s possible to have an immunization before the end of the year, and potentially as early as next month.