Already the second western pharmaceutical company to face problems during a COVID-19 coronavirus vaccine trial.
Representatives of the American company Johnson & Johnson reported that they are suspending clinical trials on a drug that caused the participant in the trial to have an “unexplained disease”. The company refused to disclose details of the incident for confidentiality reasons.
An independent expert council is now in charge of the matter. Tests have been suspended and the online system used to register participants in trials has been closed.
This is not the first incident. As News Front previously reported, the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, from which the US has already pre-ordered the vaccine, had to stop the trials due to a serious side effect. Although AstraZeneca did not disclose the details of the incident, a source in The New York Times said that a participant in a UK trial had transverse myelitis, an inflammatory syndrome that affects the spinal cord.
Even then, the expert community noticed that the incident called into question the findings of American Johnson & Johnson and Chinese CanSino Biologics due to the adenoviral vector used.