The clinical trials of AstraZeneca vaccine were halted recently due to some safety reasons in the United Kingdom when one of the volunteers reported unexplained illness in his body after taking the vaccine. After the safety review, the Oxford and his partner drug company said in a separate statement that the clinical trial will resume.
Why the trial was halted?
AstraZeneca in collaboration with Oxford University was working on the front line for a successful trial of the COVID-19 vaccine. The collaboration seemed promising and everyone had hope. The trial was running in countries like US, UK, Brazil and South Africa. Recently in the UK one of the volunteers who participated in the trial of the vaccine experienced an unexplained illness due to which the drug regulator had to thwart the vaccine trial and look for the reason of the unexplained illness. An independent expert team was sent for probe and to verify whether the illness was caused due to the vaccine or it happened due to something else.
Why the trial resumed now?
Recently on Saturday both the Oxford University and the drug regulator completed the probe and came up with the safety report that the unexplained illness was not caused due to the vaccine. The report, however, did not mention the cause of the illness neither did it mentioned about the fate of the clinical trials happening in other countries.
Progress of clinical trial
The clinical trial of the vaccine is ongoing in the US, UK, Brazil, South Africa and India. The trial has reached in phase III in South Africa, Brazil and the US. In the UK and in India phase II and Phase III trial is being conducted simultaneously.
Other major contenders
As of now around 180 vaccine manufacturing company are in the pre-clinical and clinical trial of the vaccine. Out of these around 35 have reached in clinical trials and eight in the final stage of trial that is phase III trial. Some popular companies other than AstraZeneca are, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, Russian vaccine being developed by Gamaleya.
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