Coronavirus vaccine could be ready in September, Oxford University

Coronavirus vaccine could be ready in September, Oxford University

A vaccine to combat the Covid-19 pandemic could be rolled out as early as September. In the race to find a coronavirus cure, the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom appears to have edged ahead of three Chinese consortiums.  Last week, the UK government announced that a further 20 million pound, or US$24.7 million, would be injected into the project. "We aim to have about a million doses by September once we have the results of our vaccine efficacy tests," Professor Adrian Hill, the director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford, told the media.

"Then we'll move even faster from there because it's pretty clear that the world is going to need hundreds of millions of doses ideally by the end of the year to end this pandemic and let us out of lockdown safely," he added. Emergency approval will be needed for the vaccine to be mass-produced if it proves "safe and effective." Health workers would be at the front of the queue. But before then, UK human trials will be expanded to 6.000 test cases by the end of May from 1,112 during phase one.

Back in March, scientists at the National Institutes of Health's Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana "inoculated six rhesus macaque monkeys" with a single dose of the Oxford vaccine. They had been bombarded by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the Covid-19 disease, under laboratory conditions.

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