On Monday night, reporter Peter Aldis was relaxing, watching some TV, trying to unwind.

I had finished my day.

I think it was 9.21 pm my time, just after midnight, East Coast time.

Peter covers science for Buzzfeed.

And you can hear it in his voice.

He's the kind of person precise enough to note that something happened at 9.21.

Earlier that day, he'd written a story about AstraZeneca's newest COVID vaccine trial.

The results looked pretty good.

It seemed like the vaccine was 79% effective.

But then he got this email just after 9.21 pm from the National Institutes of Health.

It's something that I've just never seen before, which is basically saying that the data

monitoring committee for the big US trial of AstraZeneca's coronavirus vaccine was

concerned about the statement AstraZeneca had put out.

Basically, AstraZeneca's data, the data that looked positive, the data that was in Peter's

earlier story, was outdated and potentially misleading.

AstraZeneca, the NIH essentially, said, made its vaccine look better than it really was.

In Peter's world, this was a five alarm fire.

And immediately I stopped what I was doing, what to see.

And I'm emailing AstraZeneca and the NIH and my editors as what is going on here.

How unusual is it to get a statement like that?

I mean, for someone like me who's not deep in the weeds, it felt really strange.

For someone like me who is rather deeper in the weeds, it felt very strange.

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