Vaccine results shot in the arm for Covid fight

Oxford-astrazeneca’s Covid vaccine safe, prompts immune response in early tests

LONDON: A vaccine for Covid-19 developed by Oxford University and Astrazeneca was safe and produced an immune response in early-stage clinical trials, data showed on Monday, raising hopes that the world could soon find a way to stop the virus that has taken an unprecedented human and economic toll across the planet.

Published in The Lancet, the peer-reviewed report showed that the 1,077 healthy adults who were given the AZD1222 vaccine did not develop any serious side effects, and their bodies developed an immune response that could protect people for a significant amount of time.

The results came separately as two other vaccine candidates – one being developed in China and the other in Germany – reported positive results from their studies. The Oxford vaccine candidate is largely considered the frontrunner since it has carried out trials on the widest set of people among all.

Adrian Hill, the head of the Oxford University’s Jenner Institute that invented the vaccine candidate, said that it was possible that the vaccine would become available by the end of the year, news agency Reuters reported. “There might be a million doses manufactured by September: that now seems like a remarkable underestimate, given the scale of what’s going on,” said Hill, referring to the manufacturing capability of part

ner Astrazeneca.

“Certainly there’ll be a million doses around in September. What’s less predictable than the manufacturing scale-up is the incidence of disease, so when there’ll be an endpoint,” he added.

The widely followed Oxford vaccine trial is currently at an advanced stage, with studies being carried out in the UK, Brazil and South Africa. A collaboration has already been reached between Oxford, UK government and biopharma major Astrazeneca to produce the vaccine on a mass scale if the final results are also positive.

The Serum Institute of India is one of the global partners for its production, a deal that would involve the Pune-based facility producing 400 million doses that will be distributed across dozens of lower and middle-income countries such as India.

The head of emergencies at the World Health Organization (WHO) hailed the findings about the vaccine as “good news”. “We now need to move into largerscale real-world trials,” Dr Michael Ryan told reporters at a news conference in Geneva, while warning: “there’s a long way to go”. “But it is good to see more data and more products moving into this very important phase of vaccine discovery.”

“There is still much work to be done before we can confirm if our vaccine will help manage the Covid-19 pandemic,” vaccine developer Sarah Gilbert said, according to Reuters. “We still do not know how strong an immune response we need to provoke to effectively protect against Sarscov-2 infection,” she said, adding researchers needed to learn more about Covid-19 and continue late stage trials which have already commenced.

More than 165 possible vaccines are in various stages of development.