LONDON: Britain will begin human trials of a coronavirus vaccine on Thursday, with the country “throwing everything” at developing the first successful inoculation, the health secretary said. Scientists in Oxford will begin to test the safety of the drug for use on humans, Matt Hancock announced.
At the same press briefing, he also announced £20 million ($24.7 million) in funding to push it through larger-scale human trials over the summer, as well as £22.5 million for another vaccine project underway at Imperial College London.
“Both of these promising projects are making rapid progress,” Hancock said. “I’ve told the scientists leading them that we’ll do everything in our power to support (them). In the long run, the best way to defeat coronavirus is through a vaccine.”
He added that “in normal times” it would take years for vaccines to reach this stage, but that speed is now crucial. However, the announcement also came with a warning from Britain’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, that every vaccine is a “long shot.”
There are now more than 100 vaccine projects in development worldwide, but only teams in the US and China, and soon the UK, have injected humans.
The initial safety trials beginning on Thursday are a precursor to more widespread trials for effectiveness, in which thousands are given the drug to test if it protects people from infection.
Whether a vaccine can be developed before the end of the year will depend on the speed of the trials and whether it can be produced at scale.
Normally, manufacturers would wait for a vaccine to be proved successful before beginning production, but the scale of the coronavirus crisis means that could result in months of delay and many lives lost.
To counter this, Hancock said manufacturing investment will be running in parallel to the vaccine trials. “If either of these vaccines safely works, then we can make it available as soon as humanly possible,” he added.
“After all, the upside of being the first country in the world to develop a successful vaccine is so huge that I’m throwing everything at it.”
Sarah Gilbert, an Oxford University professor of vaccinology, said her team had compressed five years of work into four months to reach this stage. “It’s not just for this country, we need to make a vaccine for the world,” she added. “The prospects (of it being ready by autumn if trials are successful) are very good, but it’s not certain.”
