ABOUT CORONAVIRUS VACCINE TRIAL PAUSE
Canberra: Australia is not worried about a report that a COVID-19 vaccine trial has been put on hold due to suspected serious adverse reaction, its deputy chief medical officer said yesterday, as daily cases nudged higher in the country’s coronavirus hot spot.
AstraZeneca Plc has paused a latestage trial of one of the leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates after adverse reaction in a study participant, health news website Stat News reported late on Tuesday.
“With the information that I have got at the moment, I am not worried about it,” Australia’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer Nick Coatsworth told Sky News, adding the hold on trials does not mean the vaccine “is off the table”.
“In some respects, this is a very positive thing because it shows that despite the accelerated vaccine development, safety is the priority of the clinical trialists and investigators.”
Mr Coatsworth said Australia like many other governments had invested in several coronavirus vaccine candidates, “knowing not all of them will get through”.
AstraZeneca’s decision to place the trial on hold comes after a pledge from nine leading U.S. and European vaccine developers on Tuesday to uphold scientific safety and efficacy standards for their vaccines despite the urgency to contain the pandemic.
Australia on Monday said it would get the first doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine in January 2021 if trials proved successful after reaching a preliminary deal in August. It had also signed an agreement on a COVID-19 vaccine being developed by the University of Queensland. Both these vaccines will be manufactured locally by CSL Ltd.
Australia’s coronavirus hot spot of Victoria on Wednesday, meanwhile, reported its biggest rise in daily cases in three days as the state boosted its contact tracing programme to ease the spread of the virus.
Victoria, which is at the centre of Australia’s second wave of coronavirus outbreak, now accounts for about 75 per cent of Australia’s 26,450 COVID-19 cases and 90 per cent of its 781 deaths.