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Health

AstraZeneca, IU School of Medicine COVID-19 Vaccine Trial On Hold

By Lauren Bavis

Published September 9, 2020 at 12:00 AM EDT

Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca announced Wednesday morning that its COVID-19 vaccine trial is on hold after a volunteer in the UK had an unexplained illness.

The pause includes the trial set to take place through the Indiana University School of Medicinethis fall. An IU School of Medicine spokesperson said IU had not begun enrolling vaccine trial participants and no one had been given a dose of the vaccine.

In a statement, AstraZeneca said unexplained illnesses will happen by chance in all large clinical trials, and it is standard procedure for those incidents to be independently reviewed. The company did not say what the unexplained illness was, or when trials will resume.

This story was produced by Side Effects Public Media, a news collaborative covering public health.

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Lauren Bavis

Lauren Bavis is the digital editor for health and education at WFYI and Side Effects Public Media, a Midwest health reporting collaboration based at WFYI. She was previously an investigative reporter for Side Effects, and with Jake Harper co-hosted Sick, a podcast about what goes wrong in the places meant to keep us healthy. She joined WFYI in 2018, and was part of the Side Effects Public Media team named Indiana’s Journalists of the Year in 2019 by the Indiana Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. She graduated from Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland, and moved to Indiana in 2012. She previously reported on health and social services for the Bloomington Herald-Times.

See stories by Lauren Bavis

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