Inside Oxford's Vaccine Saga: From Wild Hype to Sobering Reality

[brooklynite]

Politico

In April, Sarah Gilbert, the British scientist leading Oxford University’s Covid-19 vaccine effort, said she was 80 percent confident her team would be able to produce a successful vaccine by September.

It was a remarkable statement—conspicuously confident—especially given the timing: Oxford’s vaccine had yet to be tested in a single human, and the results from a preliminary trial involving monkeys hadn’t yet been published.

With pandemic death rates in the U.S. and Britain ratcheting upward, Gilbert’s forecast soothed panicky citizens who had been told that it typically takes years to develop a successful vaccine. The New York Times wrote that Oxford had leapt ahead of the competition and was “sprinting fastest” to the finish line. Within weeks, Oxford had partnered with British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca and the two were inking deals around the world to manufacture and distribute hundreds of millions of doses. The vaccine became one of the world’s best hopes: By late August, with Phase III trials to determine safety and efficacy ongoing, the world had ordered more of the Oxford candidate than any other, at least 2.94 billion doses.

Now, Gilbert’s, and the world’s, hopes are coming back down to earth, with the news that AstraZeneca paused Phase III trials after one participant in Britain showed symptoms consistent with transverse myelitis, a rare neurological disease caused by inflammation of the spinal cord. Obstacles like this one are not unexpected in vaccine development, experts say. The fact that AstraZeneca is pausing trials to investigate, they point out, is a good thing—a signal that that system is working as it should, that drug companies are taking safety seriously, that there are some scientific norms that politics hasn’t trampled.

[Thekaspervote]

1. I hope everyone is paying attention here!! You can't rush this stuff