One of the first volunteers in a British trial of a coronavirus vaccine has refuted a fake news report that she had died.Elisa Granato was one of two people injected last week in Oxford, England, for the first human trial in Europe of a potential vaccine.
The BBC’s medical correspondent Fergus Walsh, who covered the beginning of the vaccine trial, wrote on Twitter that he had spoken to Dr Granato over Skype that morning.
Fake news has been circulating on social media that the first volunteer in the Oxford vaccine trial has died. This is not true! I spent several minutes this morning chatting with Elisa Granato via Skype. She is very much alive and told me she is feeling “absolutely fine” pic.twitter.com/iWAtYaSkRZ
— Fergus Walsh (@BBCFergusWalsh) April 26, 2020
Rumours swept social media that she had died but Ms Granato and the British government debunked the news.
The link to the fake story was posted on some Facebook group pages that opposed vaccination.
Microbiologist Elisa Granato is injected as part of the first human trials in the UK for a potential coronavirus vaccine. Oxford University Pool via AP.
One of the first volunteers in a British trial of a coronavirus vaccine has refuted a fake news report that she had died.
Elisa Granato was one of two people injected last week in Oxford, England, for the first human trial in Europe of a potential vaccine.
Rumours swept social media that she had died but Ms Granato and the British government debunked the news.
The link to the fake story was posted on some Facebook group pages that opposed vaccination.
“I’m very much alive, thank you,” the microbiologist said in a video posted by the BBC. “I’m having a cup of tea.”
Fake news has been circulating on social media that the first volunteer in the Oxford vaccine trial has died. This is not true! I spent several minutes this morning chatting with Elisa Granato via Skype. She is very much alive and told me she is feeling “absolutely fine” pic.twitter.com/iWAtYaSkRZ
— Fergus Walsh (@BBCFergusWalsh) April 26, 2020
The Department of Health said: “News circulating on social media that the first volunteer in a UK coronavirus vaccine trial has died is completely untrue.”
When Ms Granato began the trial, she said she wanted to help advance science.
“I’m a scientist, so of course I want to try and support science, the scientific process, whenever I can,” she said.
“And since I don’t study viruses I felt a bit useless. So I felt like this was a very easy way for me to support the cause.”That’s why I’m here and I’m excited.”
More than 150,000 coronavirus infections and more than 20,000 deaths have been confirmed in the UK.
Dr Granato herself tweeted on Sunday morning: “Nothing like [waking] up to a fake article on your death … I’m doing fine everyone. Please don’t share the article in question”. (She has since protected her Twitter account, meaning that at the time of writing the tweet is currently not publicly visible, but it can still be seen in Google’s cache of the page.)
The UK’s Department of Health and Social Care has also said that the story is “completely untrue”.
In a statement published to their website, the Oxford Vaccine Trial said: “We are aware there have been and will be rumours and false reports about the progress of the trial. We urge people not to give these any credibility and not to circulate them. We will not be offering a running commentary about the trial but all official updates will appear on this site.”
Dr Granato, who is herself a post-doctoral microbiology researcher in the Zoology department at Oxford University, was one of the first two volunteers to be injected as part of the trial into the vaccine candidate known as “ChAdOx1 nCoV-19”.
Because the trial tests ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 against a control, it is not certain that Dr Granato was even given the coronavirus vaccine: it is equally likely that she got the control injection (which in this case is a meningitis vaccine that is already licensed and widely used in the UK).