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&
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.