The Peruvian National Institutes of Health said it decided to suspend testing of the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinopharm’s COVID-19 vaccine after a volunteer participating in the trial had difficulty moving his arms.
Lead researcher German Malaga said: “A few days ago, we warned the regulators that one of the participants had neurological symptoms similar to that of the syndrome. Guillain-Barre “.
Guillain-Barre syndrome is a rare and non-contagious disorder that affects movement of the arms and legs. Peru declared a temporary medical emergency in 5 regions in June 2019 after multiple cases of this syndrome.
In the 1970s, a vaccination campaign to prevent swine flu in the United States was suspended after about 450 of those vaccinated developed the syndrome, causing paralysis.
The clinical trials of Sinopharm’s COVID-19 vaccine on about 12,000 people in Peru are scheduled to end this week. If the trials are successful, it is expected that the Peruvian government will buy up to 20 million doses of vaccine to vaccinate two-thirds of the country’s population. To date, 60,000 people globally have been vaccinated against Sinopharm, including volunteers in Argentina, Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Peru is one of the countries with the highest per capita mortality from COVID-19 in the world. As of December 11, in this country, a total of nearly 36,500 people have died out of a total of over 979,100 cases of COVID-19 infection. The pandemic has severely affected the economy of this South American country with a GDP decline of more than 30% in the second quarter of 2020.