The AstraZeneca Saga
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2021
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Back in April 2020, AstraZeneca was hailed as a frontrunner in the race to get an effective vaccine to market. A year later, after a series of trial pauses, communication blunders, and PR problems, the vaccine is on the cusp of FDA approval.
By all accounts, the company succeeded in making a safe, effective vaccine. So why has there been so much confusion about its rollout?
Guest:
Peter Aldhous, science reporter at Buzzfeed News
Host
Lizzie O’Leary
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On Monday night, reporter Peter Aldous was relaxing, watching some TV, trying to unwind. |
| 0:10.9 | I had finished my day, and I think it was 9.21 p.m. my time, just after midnight, East Coast time. |
| 0:22.0 | Peter covers science for BuzzFeed. |
| 0:24.3 | And you can hear it in his voice. |
| 0:25.9 | He's the kind of person precise enough to note that something happened at 921. |
| 0:31.5 | Earlier that day, he'd written a story about AstraZeneca's newest COVID vaccine trial. |
| 0:37.4 | The results looked pretty good. |
| 0:39.6 | It seemed like the vaccine was 79% effective. |
| 0:43.4 | But then he got this email, just after 9.21 p.m., from the National Institutes of Health. |
| 0:50.1 | With something that I just never seen before, which is basically saying that the data monitoring |
| 0:57.7 | committee for the big U.S. trial of AstraZeneca's coronavirus vaccine was concerned about the statement |
| 1:07.1 | AstraZeneca had put out. |
| 1:09.1 | Basically, AstraZeneca's data, the data that looked positive, the data that was in Peter's |
| 1:15.2 | earlier story, was outdated and potentially misleading. |
| 1:20.3 | AstraZeneca, the NIH essentially said, made its vaccine look better than it really was. |
| 1:26.5 | In Peter's world, this was a five-alarm fire. |
| 1:30.3 | Immediately I stopped what I was doing, went to see it, |
| 1:33.7 | and I'm emailing AstraZeneca and the NIH and my editors is what is going on here. |
| 1:43.9 | How unusual is it to get a statement like that? and my editors is what is going on here. |
| 1:48.0 | How unusual is it to get a statement like that? |
| 1:50.5 | I mean, for someone like me who's not deep in the weeds, |
| 1:52.1 | it felt really strange. |
... |
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