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Your Weekly Covid-19 Vaccine Update
Everything that happened in the race to find a coronavirus vaccine this week
There are still 11 vaccines in phase 3 clinical trials and six approved for limited use — no change from last week. None have been approved for general use.
Vaccines take center stage in the presidential debate. In the final and somewhat calmer presidential debate, President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden butted heads over vaccines, as expected. Trump said at one point that vaccine authorization could happen “within weeks,” though later he said it would happen by the end of this year. Biden’s vaccine authorization timeline was more in line with what experts predict: not until mid-2021. “We’re about to go into a dark winter,” he said. For more details, check out STAT’s analysis of the debate.
A dramatic week for the AstraZeneca/Oxford trial. On Tuesday, Brazilian newspaper O Globo reported that a volunteer in the phase 3 AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine trial had died due to complications from Covid-19. This raised concerns that the vaccine was unsafe, but as BBC reports, the volunteer was in the control group and did not receive the vaccine, and the trial will continue.
Johnson & Johnson pauses trial. On Monday, Johnson & Johnson announced that it was pausing all its…
