Our science is world-class, but we need your help too
IN EARLY May, the Prime Minister asked me to pull together a team to build a vaccine portfolio.
I remember him very clearly discussing his goals to secure a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine that would protect the UK population.
No vaccine has ever been developed against a human coronavirus.
Yet in our first 100 days the Taskforce has secured access to six of the most promising vaccines across four different vaccine technologies from the UK, European Union and United States, in order to maximise our chances of having a vaccine that works safely.
We have also secured an antibody cocktail to protect people with poor immune systems who cannot receive vaccines.
Having secured access to promising candidates, we need to be able to make any successful vaccine quickly – for this and future pandemics.
So we have funded the expansion of Valneva’s
Scottish vaccine manufacturing plant as well as accelerated the construction of the Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre (VMIC), which will start manufacturing vaccines later in 2021. We now need to make sure these vaccine candidates work and pass the high safety standards required in the UK.
We have had an incredible response from the public to the NHS vaccine trials registry, with more than 100,000 people already signed up via nhs.uk/ conditions/coronaviruscovid-19/research/.
But we still need more volunteers from those groups most at risk of Covid-19 infection to enrol – the elderly, adults with underlying health disorders and ethnic minorities.
The UK’s clinical trial capability is world-class and it is no surprise that we have international vaccine companies queuing up to run studies in the UK, alongside studies on vaccines from Oxford, Imperial and Cambridge Universities. So I want to urge everyone to play our part in the fight against coronavirus and join the NHS vaccine trials registry. Together, we can help to save and protect millions of lives.