The Latest on Covid-19 Vaccines
Everything that happened in the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine this week
Published in
2 min readSep 18, 2020
- Drug companies share their study game plans.The biggest coronavirus vaccine news this week is that on Thursday, two frontrunners in the race, the pharmaceutical giants Moderna and Pfizer, publicly released their protocols for evaluating their vaccines. Usually, companies do this after the trials have been completed, for competitive reasons. But as the New York Times reports, the companies were responding to people who are concerned about the safety of Covid-19 vaccines developed under intense time pressure from the president, who wants a vaccine by Election Day.
- AstraZeneca trial resumes. Last week’s big news was a dramatic pause in the clinical trials of a leading vaccine candidate developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, which occurred after one U.K.-based participant developed a severe reaction after receiving the vaccine. On Monday, Nature reported that trials had resumed in the U.K. and in Brazil, but there’s still no word on when trials in the U.S. and South Africa will follow suit. Some experts have criticized the vaccine developers for not releasing more information about the adverse reaction that the participant experienced.
- White House releases a vaccine distribution plan. On Wednesday…
