An expert on "global health": "Oxford vaccine" tests have stopped, a wake-up call

Sumya Swaminathan is the chief scientist at WHO.

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A World Health Organization expert said that stopping Oxford vaccine tests is a wake-up call for all of us.

Days earlier, the trial of the promising vaccine was suspended after one of the participants developed serious symptoms.

Somaya Swaminathan, a researcher and official in the organization, said that such situations are common in clinical trials, and "we should be prepared for them, but at the same time we should not feel discouraged."

Continue, "This is a wake-up call to the realization that there are ups and downs in clinical testing, and that we have to be prepared, and that we should not be discouraged, because these things happen."

In addition, the head of the emergency department at the World Health Organization, Mike Ryan, stressed that distributing a vaccine as quickly as possible should not be the only goal of pharmaceutical companies, “It is a race against this virus, and it is a race to save lives.” Continuing, “It is not a race between Companies, not a race between countries. "

AstraZeneca and Oxford are considered one of the largest vaccine makers in the race and are already several steps ahead of vaccines developed by Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, among others.

The vaccine developed by Sarah Gilbert and her team, in Oxford, is a virus-carrying type vaccine that uses harmless viruses to deliver the genetic material for pathogens to cells.

This genetic material then generates an immune response in the body against the true pathogen.

The process differs from conventional vaccines that use a weak or inactivated form of the pathogen to stimulate the immune response.

This new method was mentioned to be easier and therefore faster to develop.

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