The first participant in a clinical trial for a vaccine to protect against COVID-19 was yesterday to receive an experimental dose, a US government official said.
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is funding the trial, which is taking place at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle. The official who disclosed plans for the first participant spoke on condition of anonymity because the move has not been publicly announced.
Public health officials have said it would take 12 to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine.
Testing is to begin with 45 young, healthy volunteers with different doses of shots codeveloped by the institute and Moderna Inc. There is no chance participants could get infected from the shots, because they do not 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 are 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.
Also working on a vaccine are Inovio Pharmaceuticals, which aims to begin safety tests next month in a few dozen volunteers at the University of Pennsylvania and a testing center in Kansas City, Missouri, followed by a similar study in China and South Korea.
Even if initial safety tests go well, “you’re talking about a year to a year and a half” before any vaccine could be ready for widespread use, said Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
That still would be a record-setting pace, but manufacturers know the wait — required because it takes additional studies of thousands of people to tell if a vaccine truly protects and does no harm — is hard for a frightened public.
US President Donald Trump has been pushing for swift action on a vaccine, saying in recent days that the work is “moving along very quickly” and he hopes to see a vaccine “relatively soon.”
In China, scientists have been testing a combination of HIV drugs against the new coronavirus, as well as an experimental drug named remdesivir that was in development to fight Ebola.
In the US, the University of Nebraska Medical Center also began testing remdesivir in some Americans who were found to have the virus after being evacuated from a cruise ship in Japan.
The number of COVID-19 cases worldwide has surpassed 169,000 with 6,513 deaths, but among those, 77,000 have recovered from the illness.
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