NIH ‘very con­cerned’ about se­ri­ous side ef­fect in As­traZeneca's PhI­II Covid-19 tri­al

The FDA is weigh­ing whether to fol­low British reg­u­la­tors in re­sum­ing a coro­n­avirus vac­cine tri­al that was halt­ed when a par­tic­i­pant suf­fered spinal cord dam­age, even as the NIH has launched an in­ves­ti­ga­tion of the case.

“The high­est lev­els of NIH are very con­cerned,” said Avin­dra Nath, in­tra­mur­al clin­i­cal di­rec­tor and a leader of vi­ral re­search at the Na­tion­al In­sti­tute for Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­ders and Stroke, an NIH di­vi­sion. “Every­one’s hopes are on a vac­cine, and if you have a ma­jor com­pli­ca­tion the whole thing could get de­railed.”

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