What Next TBD: The AstraZeneca Saga

Slate Daily Feed

Slate Podcasts

News, Business, Society & Culture

4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2021

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	We've only just had Halloween. Surely it's too soon for an advent calendar, isn't it?
0:05.0	Nope.
0:07.0	Because this year, Christmas starts early with McDonald's festive wins.
0:11.0	Every day in November, you can unlock tasty food offers, grab amazing Mackey's
0:16.0	merge or even win incredible prizes. Play festive wins now, only on the
0:21.6	McDonald's app.
0:23.0	18 plus until the 30th of November when a troop day UK only tease and sees apply. On Monday night, reporter Peter Aldous was relaxing, watching some TV, trying to unwind.
0:41.3	I had finished my day day and I think it was 921 PM my time just after midnight
0:50.4	East Coast time. Peter covers science for BuzzFeed,
0:54.0	and you can hear it in his voice.
0:56.0	He's the kind of person precise enough to note
0:59.0	that something happened at 921.
1:01.0	Earlier that day, he'd written a story about AstraZeneca's newest COVID vaccine trial.
1:07.6	The results looked pretty good.
1:09.8	It seemed like the vaccine was 79% effective. But then he got this email just after 921 PM from the National
1:18.7	Institutes of Health. With 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
1:36.8	statement AstraZeneca had put out.
1:38.8	Basically, AstraZeneca's data, the data that looked positive, the data that was in Peter's earlier story, was outdated and potentially misleading.
1:50.0	AstraZeneca, the NIH essentially said, made its vaccine look better than it really was.
1:56.7	In Peter's world, this was a five alarm fire.
2:00.4	Immediately I stopped what I was doing, went to see it, and I'm emailing AstraZeneca and the
2:08.9	NIH and my editors is what is going on here.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate Podcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Slate Podcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.