False claims that COVID-19 vaccine trials were halted when animals died in preclinical studies are making the rounds on social media again, according to reports.
The misinformation gained traction in 2021 after Sen. Bob Hall (R-Texas) claimed at a hearing that the "American people are now guinea pigs." A 1-minute clip of his remarks was recently re-upped on Twitter, including the false claim that early-phase studies for COVID vaccines were stopped due to safety issues.
"What I have read, they actually started the animal tests and because the animals were dying, they stopped the tests," Hall claimed in 2021, according to Associated Press (AP). "They didn't do the human testing and they stopped the animal tests because the animals were dying, and then they turned it out for the public," Hall said.
None of the makers of COVID vaccines for the U.S. reported that preclinical testing was stopped due to animal safety concerns, AP noted. A spokesperson for Pfizer, maker of the Comirnaty vaccine, confirmed in an email to MedPage Today that, "Pfizer conducted and completed preclinical studies of our COVID-19 vaccine in 2020," and pointed to a September 2020 press release with data from those preclinical studies. A peer-reviewed paper was published in Nature in 2021.
A spokesperson at Janssen, maker of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) viral vector-based COVID vaccine, also told MedPage Today in an email that "No vaccine-related deaths were observed in preclinical tests of our...
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