American officials question AstraZeneca’s vaccine results

A BAFFLING CONTROVERSY has unfolded over AstraZeneca’s covid-19 vaccine. On the morning of March 22nd, the company announced positive results about the jab’s safety and efficacy from a clinical trial with 32,000 people conducted mostly in America. But late that night the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), an American government agency that funded the trial, issued a vaguely worded statement that questioned the company’s announcement. AstraZeneca, it said, “may have included outdated information” which “may have provided an incomplete view of the efficacy data”.Not much clarity has emerged so far, officially. On March 23rd AstraZeneca (which developed its jab with a team at Oxford University) responded that the results in question were from a “pre-specified interim analysis” of data up to February 17th. Such reporting milestones are standard in clinical trials. The company promised to publish more data within 48 hours. A preliminary analysis of that forthcoming data, it said, had found that the results were “consistent” with what it published.