Scientists begin immunizing

Early COVID-19 trial in Britain aims to vaccinate hundreds

LONDON — Scientists at Imperial College London say they are immunizing hundreds of people with an experimental coronavirus vaccine in an early trial after seeing no safety problems in a small number vaccinated so far.

Dr. Robin Shattock, a professor at the college, said that he and colleagues had finished a slow and arduous process of testing the vaccine at a low dose in the initial participants and would expand the trial to about 300 people, including some over age 75.

“It’s well-tolerated. There aren’t any side effects,” he said. Shattock, who is leading the vaccine research at Imperial, said he hopes to have enough safety data to start inoculating several thousand people in October.

Since COVID-19 infections have dropped in Britain, making it difficult to determine whether the vaccine works, Shattock said he and his colleagues are looking to test their vaccine elsewhere.

The Imperial vaccine uses synthetic strands of genetic code based on the virus. Once injected into a muscle, the body’s own cells are instructed to make copies of a spiky protein on the coronavirus. That should in turn trigger an immune response so the body can fight off any COVID-19 infection.

Earlier this week, the world’s biggest coronavirus vaccine study started in the United States, with the first of 30,000 planned volunteers getting immunized with shots created by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Moderna Inc.

Several other vaccines made by China and by Britain’s Oxford University, based on different vaccine technologies, began smaller final-stage tests in Brazil and other hard-hit countries this month.

The World Health Organization has said multiple vaccine approaches are necessary for COVID-19, noting that the usual success rate for vaccine development is about 10 percent.

Shattock said there were several coronavirus vaccines now in clinical trials, and he predicted that at least some of them would prove to be effective.

“We have 20 vaccines in clinical trials, (so) we can be pretty confident that at least two of those will work,” he said. “It really depends on how strong the immune response needs to be to provide protection.”