There are no shortcuts to Covid-19 vaccine

The halting of the trial of the Oxford University-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine that was under development may have caused disappointment among large numbers of people who were waiting for it. It was considered to hold the most promise for efficacy and for early delivery among the more than 150 vaccine candidates on which research is going on in various countries.

Though Russia has announced that its vaccine, Sputnik-V, is almost ready, the world has not accepted it as reliable. There was a lot of hope riding on the AstraZeneca vaccine, and the third and final stage trials were being conducted in four countries.

In India, the trials were being conducted by the Pune-based Serum Institute of India. There was so much confidence about the success of the vaccine, which had cleared all tests and trials done till now, that its production had already started.

The trials were suspended because a participant in the United Kingdom developed an unexplained illness. Only one adverse event, in the form of a spinal cord problem, has been noticed but that is enough to suspend the trials because the most important consideration in vaccine trials is the safety of the participants. The problem may not have been caused by the vaccine but till the time the cause is established, the trial had to be paused.

There is no surprise in this, and it is as it should be. It is not known why Serum Institute did not pause the trials when they were stopped in other countries and had to be prodded by the Drugs Controller-General of India (DCGI) to do so. It should be noted that in July also, the trials were stopped in the UK as another patient had developed a different problem, but it was later found out to be unrelated to the vaccine.

Such problems have arisen during the trials of all vaccines that have been developed. That is why it has sometimes taken years to develop a vaccine. In the case of the coronavirus, the efforts were expedited because of the urgency in developing a vaccine or a drug, but that does not mean that there should be any relaxation of safety standards.

In fact, there should be special and more than normal attention to safety in the case of Covid-19 because the largest number of people in history, potentially the entire world population, have to be vaccinated with it in the shortest possible time. So, there is a need for patience. There is hope that the trials will resume soon, and also that the work on other vaccines will also be successful. Dropping standards or advancing deadlines seldom work in research. Neither should be done.