A patient in the Astra Zeneca COVID-19 vaccine trials experienced a serious neurological reaction, triggering the company to halt its testing while a review of the case was made. CEO Pascal Soriot talked about it in a closed meeting with its investment bank J.P. Morgan, but gave no public details on the patient’s condition, not even to the company’s stockholders.
Adding more fuel to the fire, Pfizer announced Saturday, September 12, 2020, that it was expanding its clinical trials to include more participants, but did not say why. Between the two, the lack of transparency is causing some outside scientists to demand more details on the drug companies’ safety protocols and what’s going on in the clinical trials themselves.
“These experts say American taxpayers are entitled to know more since the federal government has committed billions of dollars to vaccine research and to buying the vaccines once they are approved,” Yahoo! News reported.
“Trust is in short supply,” Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist and health care researcher at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, told Yahoo!. “And the more that they can share, the better off we are.”
SOURCE: Yahoo! News September 14, 2020