Coronavirus Vaccine: Volunteers in the United Kingdom have been injected with the vaccine at Oxford University today.
The vaccine is meant to be tested on a sample of 800 people and two people have been injected today. Of the 800 people, 400 of them will be injected with the vaccine and the remaining 400 will be injected with a vaccine which protects against meningitis but not coronavirus.
The patients involved in clinical trials will not know which vaccine they have received.
Elisa Granato, one of the two who received the jab, told the BBC: “I’m a scientist, so I wanted to try to support the scientific process wherever I can.”
Sarah Gilbert, professor of vaccinology at the Jenner Institute, led the pre-clinical research.
“Personally I have a high degree of confidence in this vaccine,” she said
“Of course, we have to test it and get data from humans. We have to demonstrate it actually works and stops people getting infected with coronavirus before using the vaccine in the wider population.”
Prof Gilbert previously said she was “80% confident” the vaccine would work, but now prefers not to put a figure on it, saying simply she is “very optimistic” about its chances.
So how does the vaccine work?
The vaccine is made from a weakened version of a common cold virus (known as an adenovirus) from chimpanzees that has been modified so it cannot grow in humans.
The Oxford team has already developed a vaccine against Mers, another type of coronavirus, using the same approach – and that had promising results in clinical trials.
How will they know if it works?
The only way the team will know if the Covid-19 vaccine works is by comparing the number of people who get infected with coronavirus in the months ahead from the two arms of the trial.
That could be a problem if cases fall rapidly in the UK, because there may not be enough data.
Prof Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, who is leading the trial, said: “We’re chasing the end of this current epidemic wave. If we don’t catch that, we won’t be able to tell whether the vaccine works in the next few months. But we do expect that there will be more cases in the future because this virus hasn’t gone away.”
The vaccine researchers are prioritising the recruitment of local healthcare workers into the trial as they are more likely than others to be exposed to the virus.
A larger trial, of about 5,000 volunteers, will start in the coming months and will have no age limit.
Older people tend to have weaker immune responses to vaccines. Researchers are evaluating whether they might need two doses of the jab.
The Oxford team is also considering a vaccine trial in Africa, possibly in Kenya, where the rates of transmission are growing from a lower base.
If the numbers could be a problem, why not deliberately infect volunteers with coronavirus?
That would be a quick and certain way to find out if the vaccine was effective, but it would be ethically questionable because there are no proven treatments for Covid-19.
But that might be possible in the future. Prof Pollard said: “If we reach the point where we had some treatments for the disease and we could guarantee the safety of volunteers, that would be a very good way of testing a vaccine.”
Is it safe?
The trial volunteers will be carefully monitored in the coming months. They have been told that some may get a sore arm, headaches or fevers in the first couple of days after vaccination.
They are also told there is a theoretical risk that the virus could induce a serious reaction to coronavirus, which arose in some early Sars animal vaccine studies.
But the Oxford team says its data suggests the risk of the vaccine producing an enhanced disease is minimal.
Scientists there hope to have one million doses ready by September, and to dramatically scale up manufacturing after that, should the vaccine prove effective.