AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine Data Faces Scrutiny, Skepticism

Just a few days after AstraZeneca touted a vaccine candidate with “90% efficacy” against the coronavirus, scientists and experts are raising red flags. What are they saying?


Summary

Days after announcing a vaccine candidate with up to a 90% effectiveness rate, AstraZeneca is facing questions as experts and researchers dig deeper into the pharmaceutical company’s data.

 

reporting from the left side of the aisle

 

  • CNN’s reporting casts a regulatory cloud over the news, and includes quotes an official from the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates vaccines in the United States, who said it “was hard to know the significance of their findings” in light of the limited data released earlier in the week.
  • Vox spent its reporting on a deep dive in the trial and approval process, and noted another instance of AstraZeneca’s data being incomplete: they did not report the difference between placebo and actual vaccines recipients among those who eventually contracted coronavirus.
  • Huffington Post calls the opaque results of AstraZeneca’s study “a particularly significant problem” because those who received half-doses were also in the lowest risk category, and not likely to be in the first wave of recipients of an approved vaccine in the United Kingdom.

 

 

 


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© Dallas Gerber, 2020