The Centre for Vaccinology of the university hospital in the Belgian city of Ghent (CEVAC) will start vaccinating its test subjects with Johnson & Johnson's candidate coronavirus vaccine again on Thursday.
On Tuesday, Ghent's University Hospital (UZ Gent) confirmed that Johnson & Johnson's vaccinations would be resumed on Thursday, after they had been halted following the appearance of an "unexplained illness" in a test subject who had taken part in a Phase 3 study abroad in October.
On 23 October, the international headquarters of Johnson & Johnson communicated that there was no causality between the symptoms detected and the vaccine, and that the trials would be resumed.
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When announcing the temporary halting of the trials in October, the company stressed that study pauses were a common and expected occurrence during not always publicly communicated by firms, and said that they were not the same as a regulatory hold, which is a paused ordered by a national health authority.
For the start of Phase 3 in the development on a vaccine, Johnson & Johnson’s ENSEMBLE double-blind trials aimed to recruit 60,000 volunteers with and without comorbidities in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, South Africa and the United States.
Additionally, another study into a German candidate coronavirus vaccine from the German pharmaceutical company Curevac is also ongoing in Ghent.
Maïthé Chini
The Brussels Times
