São Paulo-Sana
Health authorities in Brazil said today that a volunteer in a clinical trial on a vaccine to prevent the emerging corona virus developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca has passed away, but added that the experiment will continue.
A source familiar with the matter told Reuters that "the Brazilian experiment would have been stopped if the volunteer who died was among the group that received the vaccine."
This statement indicates that the volunteer was part of a control group in which the participants were given a meningitis vaccine.
Oxford confirmed the decision to continue testing the vaccine and said in a statement that "after careful evaluation of the situation, there were no safety concerns in the clinical trial."
Participants and investigators are not informed of which group they belong to.
CNN Brasil reported that the 28-year-old volunteer who was living in Rio de Janeiro had died of complications from COVID-19.
