Vaccine maker AstraZeneca made the news the first week of September when they announced that they’d temporarily halted their COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials because a patient may have suffered severe neurological reactions to the vaccine.
The participant in question experienced symptoms consistent with transverse myelitis, a rare inflammation of the spinal cord, The Associated Press reported. AstraZeneca resumed the trials a few days later when it was decided the illnesses were “either considered unlikely to be associated with the vaccine or there was insufficient evidence to say for certain that the illnesses were or were not related to the vaccine.”
A curious side note to the story is the fact that the report was referenced in the plural, using “volunteers” and “illnesses,” rather than singular verbs and nouns. Is this because the September stoppage wasn’t the first time AstraZeneca halted the trials?
It turns out they stopped the trials in July when a different participant suffered neurological problems, but those events were attributed to a previously undiagnosed case of multiple sclerosis. AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot made the disclosure during a private conference call with investors; a company spokesperson did not answer Stat News requests for more information.
Since AstraZeneca has now had at least two reports of serious neurological events in connection with the coronavirus vaccine testing, it naturally leads to the question: Are there any other adverse reactions that AstraZeneca hasn’t made public, and if there are, just what are they, and how many are there?
SOURCES:
Reuters September 16, 2020
The Associated Press September 12, 2020
Stat News September 9, 2020