The U.K.'s health minister on Wednesday rushed to defend AstraZeneca's decision to pause a closely-watched coronavirus vaccine trial due to safety concerns.
AstraZeneca announced Tuesday that the pause was due to a potentially unexplained illness in one of its trials.Its London-listed shares slipped 0.4% as European markets opened on Wednesday. An engineer shows an experimental vaccine for the COVID-19 coronavirus that was tested at the Quality Control Laboratory at the Sinovac Biotech facilities in Beijing.
LONDON — The U.K.'s health minister on Wednesday rushed to defend AstraZeneca's decision to pause a closely-watched coronavirus vaccine trial due to safety concerns, saying that the decision is not necessarily a setback to its development.announced Tuesday that the pause was due to a potentially unexplained illness in one of its trials. The pharma giant's shares fell more than 6% in after-hours trading Tuesday and its London-listed shares slipped 0.4% as European markets opened on Wednesday. "It is obviously a challenge to this particular vaccine," Matt Hancock told Sky News when asked about the pause in the trial of the vaccine which is being developed with Oxford University. "It's not actually the first time that it's happened to the Oxford vaccine and it's a standard process in clinical trials whenever they find something that they need to investigate," he added. Asked whether it would set back attempts to find a Covid-19 vaccine, he said: "Not necessarily, it depends on what they find when they do the investigation."
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