There appears to be great light at the end of the tunnel as the United Kingdom will begin to try out a Coronavirus vaccine on people from tomorrow. The COVID-19 vaccine is being developed by scientists at the University of Oxford, who have said it has an 80% chance of success.
The U.K. government will provide £20 million ($24 million) to the university’s team and a further £22.5 million to Imperial College, where scientists are also working on a vaccine. Scientists at Oxford have said the aim is to produce a million doses of the vaccine by September.
Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock praised both teams for making “rapid progress” and said the U.K. will throw “everything we’ve got” at developing a vaccine. The UK will also spring quickly into massive manufacturing once the vaccine passes the trials.
The Oxford University project, a collaboration between the university’s Jenner Institute and Oxford Vaccine Group, recruited healthy adults between age 18 and 55 at the end of March, having begun research on a vaccine against COVID-19 in February 2020. Trials start tomorrow.
The Oxford University team’s experimental vaccine, called “ChAdOx1 nCoV-19”, is a type of immunisation known as a recombinant viral vector vaccine. It is just one of at least 70 potential COVID-19 candidate shots under development by biotech and research teams around the world.
On how they got vaccine approval quickly, Professor Sarah Gilbert, who is leading the study, said it was their ongoing research into “Disease X” – an unknown infectious agent earmarked as a potential pandemic in the making – which allowed them to pivot so quickly to COVID-19.
Once a viable vaccine is found, billions of doses will be needed – a challenge that will involve international collaboration in order to meet demand.
