6,000 volunteers are set to be injected with a new experimental Covid vaccine modelled on the ebola jab in phase 3 clinical testing as the country hopes to bring an end to the pandemic as swiftly and safely as possible.
vaccine
News of a new vaccine with a reported 90% efficacy rate broke last week, with the EU announcing it will be purchasing 300 million doses of the new Pfizer jab and an equal amount of other jabs in a bid to have one million doses ready to be shipped across the bloc.
The UK government has signed a deal for 90 million doses of vaccines, however, these numbers have been reduced as the government moves away from plans to provide mass-inoculation for the public.
The vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca is among the experimental jabs undergoing clinical trials alongside one being developed by US pharmaceutical firm Novavax.
It is the third vaccine to undergo such clinical tests in the UK.
Phase three trials are designed to test the safety and efficacy of drugs in larger sample sizes of thousands of people and up. The 6,000 volunteers will be tested at 17 different sites across the UK with a further 24,000 volunteers to be recruited from other countries.
The vaccine being tested from the University of Oxford weakened common cold virus called adenovirus - which is based on a similar virus found in chimpanzees.
The other jab being tested, the Jenssen vaccine, contains an adenovirus from humans, which has been engineered to stop the disease cells from multiplying.
Experts have stressed the need for large-scale trials to take place despite last week's results of the Pfizer vaccine.
Kate Bingham, who leads the government's vaccine taskforce said in a statement: “The recent news is enormously exciting for the whole world, but we must not take our focus off continuing the important research to work out which vaccines work best for different people to provide long-lasting, effective protection against Covid-19."
Saul Faust, professor of paediatric immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Southampton and a principal investigator for the Jenssen trials told the Guardian: “We also can’t be certain that vaccine supply will be efficient and effective and secure from any one manufacturer, wherever it’s being made in the world."
As of this week, over 25,000 volunteers have taken part in vaccine trials and more than 310,000 have expressed interest by signing up to the NHS's vaccine registry.
News of a vaccine presents a potential end to the worst of the pandemic and sets up the path to recovery.
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