‘No One Controls the Timeline’: Ezekiel Emanuel Calls Out ‘Foolhardy’ Predictions About Vaccine Release Date After Pause in AstraZeneca Covid Trial
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel took a barely veiled shot at President Donald Trump’s optimistic take on the progress of a Covid-19 vaccine, calling frequent predictions about its release date “foolhardy” after news broke on Tuesday afternoon that he Univ. of Oxford-AstraZeneca trial was put on hold after an possible adverse reaction in a single patient.
Speaking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room, Emanuel, an adviser to the Biden campaign’s Covid task force, warned about the implications from one of the coronavirus trials being paused because a patient in the U.K. has come down with an unexplained illness.
“Health officials have warned that vaccine development is complicated. Nothing is guaranteed. How concerning is this news to you?” Blitzer asked.
“It is concerning, and it does tell you that predicting a date by which we’re going to have results and we’re going to introduce a vaccine is foolhardy because nature takes its course,” Emanuel said.
Trump has repeatedly predicted that a Covid-19 vaccine will ready by Election Day, even though his own administration experts, like Dr Anthony Fauci, have contradicted that and estimated that a vaccine might be ready by the end of 2020, at the earliest.
“Part of nature taking its course are unexpected adverse events that you need to understand and learn about before you can continue to enroll patients in a trial to make sure that it’s not the Covid vaccine that’s causing this,” Emanuel explained. “Similarly, you know, you can only get results when people get exposed to Covid and people come down with Covid, and you don’t know how frequently that’s going to happen because a lot depends upon how much Covid there is in the community, how exposed people are. And so we just learned that, you know, no one controls the timeline on these vaccine developments due to adverse events and exposure to the virus. And so we’re at the mercy of nature here.”
What happens next, with the trial on pause, Blitzer asked.
“They’re going to investigate whether they think this adverse event is caused by the vaccine that this person got or whether it just happens to be some other illness that they might have got concomitantly,” Emanuel noted. “Obviously, everyone who has gotten a vaccine will continue to be monitored for getting Covid and getting any other side effects, and they won’t restart until they’re confident that this is not — that this serious adverse event has not been caused by the Covid vaccine. So that’s the determination they’re going to have to make.”
Watch the video above, via CNN.
