The American company Johnson & Johnson will soon resume the third phase of trials of the coronavirus vaccine after the death of one of the volunteers, as his death was not related to the drug. This is reported by The Washington Post, citing two unnamed sources.
The publication notes that the man died of a stroke. An independent committee investigated the incident and concluded that the vaccination was “not clearly related” to the incident, and that the injection could have triggered a stroke. The conclusion is made on the basis of the medical records of the deceased and a database with 100 thousand people vaccinated using the same basic technology.
Permission to resume research was obtained on October 23 from the US Food and Drug Administration. Preparations for new research have already begun in the United States. In other countries, the program resumed earlier.
The unexplained illness of a research participant, who later died, became known on 13 October. Then Johnson & Johnson suspended testing. The company carried out the third stage of clinical trials, during the first and second stages, a stable immune response was registered in volunteers. The first batch of the drug was planned to be released into circulation at the beginning of 2021.
In addition to Johnson & Johnson, the American biotechnology company Moderna, the companies Merck and Pfizer, the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, together with scientists from the University of Oxford (UK), are developing a vaccine in the United States.
