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WASHINGTON — A clinical trial evaluating a vaccine designed to protect against the new coronavirus will begin Monday, according to a government official.

The first participant in the trial will receive the experimental vaccine on Monday, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the trial has not been publicly announced yet. The National Institutes of Health is funding the trial, which is taking place at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle, the official said.

Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine.

Testing will begin with 45 young, healthy volunteers with different doses of shots co-developed by NIH and Moderna Inc. There’s no chance participants could get infected from the shots, because they don’t contain the virus itself. The goal is purely to check that the vaccines show no worrisome side effects, setting the stage for larger tests.

Dozens of research groups around the world are racing to create a vaccine as COVID-19 cases continue to grow. Importantly, they’re pursuing different types of vaccines — shots developed from new technologies that not only are faster to produce than traditional inoculations but might prove more potent. Some researchers even aim for temporary vaccines, such as shots that might guard people’s health a month or two at a time while longer-lasting protection is developed.

The worldwide outbreak has sickened more than 156,000 people and left more than 5,800 dead. The death toll in the United States is more than 50, while infections neared 3,000 across 49 states and the District of Columbia.

Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden clashed in a highly unusual Democratic debate on Sunday night over how to combat the coronavirus and whether the U.S. health care system is prepared for the worsening global pandemic, displaying the sharp ideological divide between the two men.

The virus — which has infected more than 3,300 people in the U.S. and killed at least 61 — dominated the debate, which was held at CNN’s Washington studio without a live audience to avoid the risk of spreading the respiratory infection.

Sanders and Biden — who greeted each other on stage with an elbow bump instead of a handshake — agreed President Trump is doing a horrible job in responding to the virus. However, when matters turned to how they would do things differently, the candidates began to take aim at each other.

Sanders, who wants to implement a single-payer Medicare for All system, said the current state of U.S. health care has hampered the response to the virus and accused Biden of enabling the status quo.

“Do we have the guts to take on the health care industry, some of which is funding the vice president’s campaign,” Sanders said at the outset of the debate, which was this election cycle’s first rhetorical head-tohead matchup. “Do we have the courage to take on the executives at the prescription drug industry, some of whom are funding his campaign.”

Biden, who has emerged as the clear front-runner since sweeping 10 Super Tuesday primaries last month, claimed the left-wing Vermont senator’s argument doesn’t hold water.

“With all due respect for Medicare for All, you have a single-payer system in Italy,” the former vice president said of the European country, which has experienced the continent’s worst coronavirus outbreak. “It doesn’t work there. It has nothing to do with Medicare for All. That would not solve the problem at all.”

Instead, Biden suggested making treatment for coronavirus free of charge and deal with other aspects of the health care system further down the road.