Vaccine won’t be ready until winter...at earliest
A VACCINE to protect against coronavirus will not be ready until winter at the earliest, warned a Scots scientist working on the jab.
Even operating at breakneck speed, the best part of a year is still needed to bring the vaccine to fruition, said Dr Kate Broderick.
The vaccine first needs to go through several trials – to make sure it is safe and works – before getting approval from authorities. Then hundreds of millions of doses need produced. Dr Broderick, a molecular geneticist at pharmaceutical firm Inovio in San Diego, California, said rapid advances in technology mean the process of producing a vaccine is faster than ever before.
She said: ‘The fact we are about to start clinical trials for a brand new candidate vaccine blows my mind. Everything is going to plan, we are sticking to the timeline and we are going to be in trials in very early summer.’ However, she said they had to monitor jab volunteers for several months for side-effects before they could proceed.
The first trial of their vaccine will be on 20 to 50 healthy volunteers in the US. A similar number will be recruited in China, too.
If all goes well, Inovio could roll out the vaccine for global use by winter. Governments worldwide are hoping coronavirus dies down over the summer as flu and colds tend to do – perhaps leading to its eradication.
But Dr Broderick, 42, from Dunfermline, Fife, warned against betting on the hotter months killing it.
She explained: ‘As a scientist it does concern me just a smidgen that people are pinning their hopes on the virus outbreak deteriorating as things get hotter.
‘I don’t see any evidence it’s going to follow the same pattern as the flu.’