LONDON: A vaccine against COVID-19 might not be developed until next year at the earliest, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab warned on Sunday.
A vaccine is “not likely to come to fruition this year, which could be very important if we get multiple waves of coronavirus globally down the track,” he said.
The UK, which has suffered more than 20,000 deaths from COVID-19 so far, announced on April 21 that it would be putting £41 million ($50.7 million) into two research projects to develop a vaccine.
The trials are being conducted by the Jenner Institute at Oxford University, and Imperial College, London.
The UK’s National Health Service is also currently carrying out the world’s largest trial of developed treatments for other ailments on COVID-19 patients.
The trial, called Recovery, will integrate COVID-19-specific vaccines as and when they become available. Peter Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases and global health at Oxford University, who is helping to lead Recovery, warned on April 17 that people should not expect trials to produce a “magic bullet” solution to the crisis.
FASTFACT
The UK, which has suffered more than 20,000 deaths from COVID-19 so far, announced on April 21 that it would be putting £41 million ($50.7 million) into two research projects to develop a vaccine.
Horby previously worked on the fight against Ebola following a deadly outbreak in West Africa in 2014. It took scientists five years to develop a vaccine for the virus.
The Jenner Institute’s Prof. Sarah Gilbert expressed hope earlier this month that up to 500 people would be part of the trial by mid-May, with the Oxford team “80 percent” confident of success.
The Oxford vaccine, called ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, consists of a genetically engineered chimpanzee virus altered to carry part of the coronavirus.
But former Deputy Chief Medical Officer Prof. Gina Radford said: “We haven’t got a hugely good track record with vaccines for this particular virus, coronavirus, the family of viruses.”
She added: “I think those who are very used to the process of developing vaccines are saying they are not anticipating it being available until well into next year.”
