Human trials of a potential coronavirus vaccine developed at Oxford University are to begin on Thursday, health secretary Matt Hancock has announced.
And one member of the Oxford team said that if trials are successful, millions of doses of vaccine could be available for use by the autumn of this year, in a breakthrough which would potentially signal the start of the world's slow emergence from an outbreak which has already claimed 175,000 lives and caused devastating economic damage.
Speaking at the daily 10 Downing Street press conference, Mr Hancock said the government was "throwing everything" at the search for a vaccine and announced he was providing £20 million to the Oxford team to help fund their clinical trials, with a further £22.5 million going to researchers at Imperial College London.
Despite a normal development time of 18 months or more for a vaccine, the team of researchers led by Oxford vaccinology professor Sarah Gilbert believe large-scale production could be under way as early as September - around nine months after the novel virus was first spotted in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Mr Hancock said the government will now invest in manufacturing capability so that if either the Oxford or Imperial vaccine works safely, it will be made available to the UK public “as early as humanly possible”. “Nothing about this process is certain. Vaccine development is a matter of trial and error and trial again. That’s the nature of how vaccines are developed. Every day the science gets better, we gather more information, we understand more about how to defeat the illness.But in the meantime there’s one thing we can do - and that is stay home, protect the NHS and save lives,”he declared.
