Category: Corona Virus Vaccine

Eric Ginnard - eginnard@shawmedia.com

Caption

As a public service, Shaw Media will provide open access to information related to the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) emergency. Sign up for the newsletter here

U.S. Rep. Bill Foster joined his Congressional colleagues this week in urging federal agencies to speed up the process to evaluate and approve a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.

Foster, D-Naperville, wrote the letter with 36 other members of Congress to the Health and Human Services secretary and the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, according to a news release. The legislators asked the officials to prepare to rapidly deploy a vaccine to the public once it's approved.

Every week of delay in the deployment of a vaccine to the seven billion humans on Earth will cost thousands of lives," the members wrote. "Human misery also results from the economic damage caused by COVID-19 pandemic, and by the tragic psychological impact of social isolation on humans of all ages."

The legislators argued a more rapid process is needed considering the pandemic's "enormous" costs. Once developed, they wrote, domestic production and deployment of the vaccine should be "robust."

They also explained that under the typical process, approval for a vaccine could take between 18 months and several years. Therefore, the members requested the FDA consider testing vaccines using "challenge trials" which they said experts believe could speed up the timeline.

In challenge trials, volunteers are intentionally exposed to an infectious disease to test the efficacy of a vaccine. The members added they think the trials should follow the "principle of informed consent of truly voluntary subjects."

More here:

Foster urges agencies to speed up approval of coronavirus vaccine - The Herald-News

Momentum is building to speed the development of coronavirus vaccines by intentionally infecting healthy, young volunteers with the virus. A grass-roots effort has attracted nearly 1,500 potential volunteers for the controversial approach, known as a human-challenge trial.

The effort, called1Day Sooner, is not affiliated with groups or companies developing or funding coronavirus vaccines. But co-founder Josh Morrison hopes to show that there is broad support for human-challenge trials, which have the potential to deliver an effective coronavirus vaccine more quickly than standard trials.

Typical vaccine trials take a long time because thousands of people receive either a vaccine or a placebo, and researchers track who becomes infected in the course of their daily lives. A challenge study could in theory be much faster: a much smaller group of volunteers would receive a candidate vaccine and then be intentionally infected with the virus, to judge the efficacy of the immunization.

We want to recruit as many people as possible who want to do this, and pre-qualify them as likely to be able to participate in challenge trials should they occur, says Morrison, who is also the executive director of organ-donation advocacy group Waitlist Zero. At the same time, we feel that the public policy decisions around challenge trials will be better informed if they highlight the voice of people interested in participating in such trials.

Morrison says that the people who have signed up to be part of a challenge trial tend to be young and live in urban areas, and are highly motivated to do something constructive to address the coronavirus pandemic. Many note that they recognize the risk but believe the benefits of vaccine acceleration are so tremendous that it is worth it to them, he says.

Challenge studies have been conducted before for diseases including influenza and malaria. A team led by bioethicist Nir Eyal at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey,argued that a human challenge trial could be conducted safelyand ethically, in a paper inThe Journal of Infectious Diseaseslast month.

The approach is also gaining some political support. This week, 35 members of the US Congress, led by Bill Foster (Democrat, Illinois) and Donna Shalala (Democrat, Florida),called on Department of Health and Human Services director Alex Azarto consider human-challenge trials of coronavirus vaccines.

Charlie Weller, head of the vaccines programme at Wellcome, a biomedical-research funder in London, says the charity has begun discussing the ethics and logistics of a human-challenge trial for a coronavirus vaccine. But she says it is unclear whether such a trial could actually speed vaccine development. Researchers first need to determine how to expose humans to the virus as safely as possible, and to consider how and even whether such studies can be done ethically. I think theres potential, Weller adds, but weve got so many questions to work through to understand whether it can help in the timelines we have.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on April 22 2020.

Read more about the coronavirus outbreakhere.

See the rest here:

Hundreds of People Volunteer to Be Infected with Coronavirus - Scientific American

The journalists at BuzzFeed News are proud to bring you trustworthy and relevant reporting about the coronavirus. To help keep this news free, become a member and sign up for our newsletter, Outbreak Today.

As the world waits anywhere from 18 months to years for the first effective coronavirus vaccine, some lawmakers, scientists, and bioethicists are calling for a radical push to speed up the process deliberately infecting volunteers with the virus.

On Tuesday, vaccine expert Stanley Plotkin of the University of Pennsylvania and bioethicist Arthur Caplan of New York University released an outline for these challenge studies of a coronavirus vaccine in the journal Vaccine. That followed a bipartisan group of nearly three dozen members of the House of Representatives on Monday calling on the FDA to consider such trials.

Every week of delay in the deployment of a vaccine to the seven billion humans on Earth will cost thousands of lives, said the letter, spearheaded by Rep. Bill Foster of Illinois, a scientist, and Rep. Donna Shalala of Florida, a former HHS chief. In the case of accelerated human trials, justifiable risks may be taken, they wrote, potentially by challenge trials that involve deliberately infecting volunteers who have received candidate vaccines or placebos.

Normally, deliberately giving someone an infection that is potentially lethal would be unacceptable, Caplan told BuzzFeed News. But in extreme times, like a plague, you might look to extreme measures.

The approach is unusual but not unprecedented. Still, some scientists argue that it may be too drastic of a measure given the number of unknowns with the new coronavirus.

As of Wednesday, there have been more than 2.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and nearly 180,000 deaths worldwide. More than 70 novel coronavirus vaccines are now in development, according to the World Health Organization. A March Journal of Infection report estimated that about 70% of the US population, more than 220 million people, would need to recover and gain some immunity to the virus or get vaccinated for the country to have herd immunity to future outbreaks.

Some biotech industry observers suggest that past vaccine development times could mean waiting until 2023 or 2024 for a novel coronavirus vaccine to reach enough people to blunt the spread of COVID-19. On Wednesday, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said on CBS This Morning that the agencys expectation is a vaccine will become available in March of 2021, but we are really trying to accelerate the efforts. NIAID Director Anthony Fauci told BuzzFeed News in February that if everything went perfect, starting to distribute a vaccine widely would take at least 18 months, a delivery date more like August of 2021.

Normally, vaccines require safety studies conducted in lab animals, followed by three phases of progressively larger and longer experiments on people, first to prove the vaccines are safe and then to prove that they are effective at preventing infection. Four vaccines are currently undergoing Phase 1 safety trials in small numbers of human volunteers, and one Phase 2 trial involving 500 volunteers is underway in Beijing.

If the vaccines prove safe and effective in these trials, they would move on to Phase 3 trials involving thousands of volunteers studied for around six months. Those trials require giving one group of volunteers the vaccine and another group a placebo, then waiting for the months to elapse to see how many catch the disease and how many dont, and then comparing between the two groups to figure out the efficacy of the vaccine.

If the Phase 3 trials proved successful, the vaccines would be allowed for widespread public use, but would require more time to manufacture and distribute the billions of doses needed.

A March Journal of Infectious Diseases report led by Nir Eyal of the Center for Population-Level Bioethics at Rutgers University proposed collapsing this time frame by running small challenge trials in people alongside the Phase 3 one. Essentially small groups of volunteers at low risk of dying of the disease, healthy 20- to 45-year-olds perhaps already in dangerous occupations, would be divided into two groups. One group would receive a candidate vaccine and one would get a placebo shot. They would then be exposed to increasingly large doses of the coronavirus until most of the patients in the placebo group were infected but didnt have symptoms more severe than a typical case for their age group. Intense immunological monitoring would look for any signs of dangerous side effects seen in past SARS coronavirus vaccine tests, where a mistargeted vaccine caused immunopathology in lab mice actually made the disease more deadly.

Not only would the results point to whether a vaccine works, but they would tell researchers what amount of virus exposure is needed to trigger an infection, a still undetermined data point amid debates about masks and PPE needs in hospitals and daily life.

There are plenty of young people who want to help, Caplan said. The key thing is that they have to be fully informed about the risk, and their consent should be managed by someone completely completely independent of the people running the experiment. The separate ethics board could tell volunteers, "Look, we will give you a medical exemption to get out of this if you really dont want to do it," said Caplan, to eliminate the risks of coercion or pressure to volunteer.

A Covid Challenge website noted by researchers such as Marc Lipsitch of Harvards T.H. Chan School of Public Health has been established to enlist challenge trial volunteers.

Plotkin and Caplans study design would limit volunteers to healthy 18- to 29-year-olds, noting a 0.3% death rate among patients that age in China, and start by first exposing people who had recovered from past infections to the virus. That could potentially help answer questions about how much protection antibodies from a past infection give to those who recover, another unknown.

Europe is also weighing whether to undertake challenge trials, Pieter Neels of Belgiums University of Namur and chair of the International Alliance for Biological Standardizations human vaccine committee, told BuzzFeed News. The problem is that with COVID-19, a huge knowledge is lacking, he said by email, unlike other diseases where challenge trials are used, like malaria, cholera, or influenza. There are two commercial companies in Europe that would like to perform challenge trials, he noted: hVivo in the United Kingdom and SGS in Belgium.

Not everyone in medicine thinks that deliberately infecting people with a little-understood and deadly disease with no cure is a great idea: Where youre going to give somebody a virus on purpose, you really want to understand the disease so that you know that what youre doing is a reasonable risk, Matthew Memoli of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told Science magazine in March.

People have died in challenge experiments. In 2001, Ellen Roche, a 24-year-old lab technician at Johns Hopkins, died after volunteering for an asthma treatment experiment.

The sheer logistics of setting up an ethical challenge trial is another reason for caution, vaccine expert Peter Hotez of Baylor College of Medicine, told BuzzFeed News. It would require evaluating different virus doses to determine what qualifies as a minimal dose, standardizing the challenge virus and how it would be delivered, ensuring volunteers received the newest antiviral treatment, and many other considerations absent in standard trials. His own team took years to create a model for human challenge trials of a parasite vaccine.

While Im sure these timelines can be accelerated, it still wont be easy to do this very quickly, said Hotez, It doesnt mean we shouldnt do it, it would certainly help down the line, but I dont see how it happens very fast.

A related concern is a hypothesis that there is a relationship between disease severity and the size of infectious dose they receive, biostatistics professor Natalie Dean of the University of Florida told BuzzFeed News by email. The theory raises questions about how to determine the appropriate dose to use in a human challenge trial, she asked. I don't come down firmly on either side, but I am not as clearly for it, she said.

The World Health Organization also has preparations underway to run truly massive, multinational Phase 3 trials of vaccines, where a huge number of participants could help speed up the timeline needed to determine whether the inoculation was working. The NIH announced a partnership with major drugmakers on Friday to speed vaccine development as well.

In February, Fauci told BuzzFeed News one big roadblock to developing vaccines was assuring drugmakers they wont lose money on a vaccine as happened with the Zika virus vaccine. With a worldwide pandemic and trillions of dollars in stimulus package spending later, that seems like less of a concern.

For practical reasons, challenge trials might focus only on vaccines that could be quickly made in millions of doses, said Caplan, rather than equally promising ones that dont offer an easy way to scale up. Why put people at risk for something that wont be available easily?

One other reservation that Caplan also acknowledged was concern that an authoritarian country might start challenge trials without prioritizing patient consent. He called for international standards and oversight of trials to prevent such abuses.

I do worry about that, he said. It doesnt have to happen in the US, but it should be done with independent oversight and a lot of care, wherever it happens.

View post:

Scientists Are Calling For Vaccine Experiments That Would Deliberately Infect People With The Novel Coronavirus - BuzzFeed News

Pressure to create a coronavirus vaccine is increasing by the day, but for a safe vaccine to enter the market, it takes time. USA TODAY

The Seattle volunteers who got shots in the first trial of a possible coronavirus vaccine are now getting the second shot an indicator the early trial is progressing well.

While the doctors at Kaiser Permanente'sVaccine Treatment and Evaluation Unitin Seattle dont know the results of the first round of tests, the fact that it has continued and that the second round of injections are now being given is good news, said Lisa Jackson, who is leading the study.

The trial hasnt been stopped. We know from the study protocol that if adverse events had happened, the protocol would have required that, she said.Therefore we presume those things havent happened.

The volunteers are taking part in the first investigational vaccine study to fight coronavirus. The studylaunched on March 16.

U.S. researchers have given healthy volunteers the first shot of an experimental coronavirus vaccine as anxiously awaited testing opens. The Associated Press observed as the study's first participant received the injection inside an exam room. (March 16) AP Domestic

The vaccine, called mRNA-1273, was developed by scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and at theCambridge, Mass.-based biotechnology company Moderna, Inc..

It is being given in two doses because the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, is new and no one had been exposed to it before it appeared in December, said Jackson.

Humans are a "naive" population when it comes to the virus. The first shot is a primer to set the immune system up, giving it a first look at the virus, Jackson said.

The second shot, administered 28 days later, builds on that protection so the body can more rapidly produce antibodies if it is later exposed to the virus.

After the first set of volunteers was enrolled in Seattle, the trial was expanded on March 27 to include volunteers at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. The initial group included 28 in Seattle and 17 at Emory.

The volunteers will be followed for 13 months to ensure they have no side effects or other reactions to the vaccine.

Jennifer Haller, left, smiles as the needle is withdrawn after she was given the first-stage safety study clinical trial of the potential vaccine.(Photo: Ted S. Warren, AP)

The experimental Moderna vaccine uses messenger RNA to get the bodys own cells to produce a protein found on the spikes on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus it uses to infect human cells.

The hope is that the body will respond to those proteins by mounting a robust immune response to the virus.

The National Institutes of health is now expanding the trial to include 60 adults over the age of 56, Jackson said. Some will be tested in Seattle, some in Atlanta at some at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland.

The test is part of Phase I trial of the possible vaccine. The goal is to test the safety of various doses and whether these doses produce an immune response.

Phase I trials dont study whether the vaccine is effective in preventing COVID-19 infection. That comes in Phase II.

There are no vaccines or treatments that have yet been approved for COVID-19. The Moderna vaccine was the first of more than 70 candidate vaccines currently being tested worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

In terms of treatment, thus far the most promising but still not yetapproved as it's in the testing phase may be Remdesivir, an antiviral drug from Gilead Sciences. Leaked data from a test at the University of Chicago appeared to indicate it might help those infected. The company has cautioned that until all data is analysized, it's impossible to draw any conclusions from the trial.

Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/04/22/second-round-shots-first-coronavirus-vaccine-test-start/3008506001/

See the rest here:

Doctors start giving second round of shots to volunteers in Seattle COVID-19 vaccine trial - USA TODAY

The chances of securing an effective vaccine or treatment for the coronavirus this year are "incredibly small," the UK's top medical adviser has warned.

Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, said on Wednesday that the UK would have no choice but to retain at least some of the social distancing measures currently in place.

"In the long run, the exit from this is going to be one of two things, ideally," Whitty said at the UK government's daily coronavirus press briefing.

"A vaccine, and there are a variety of ways they can be deployed ... or highly effective drugs so that people stop dying of this disease even if they catch it, or which can prevent this disease in vulnerable people."

He added: "Until we have those, and the probability of having those any time in the next calendar year is incredibly small, we should be realistic that we're going to have to rely on other social measures, which of course are very socially disruptive as everyone is finding at the moment."

Whitty said the government's focus should be on ensuring the so-called "R number" the average number of people one infected person transmits the virus to remains below one. If it rises above one, the number of people infected with the virus would rise exponentially and threaten to overwhelm the NHS.

The social distancing measures introduced by Boris Johnson in March brought the R number below one within the general population,the government believes. Ministers and scientific advisers are currently considering which measures they can lift without taking it above one again.

"What we are trying to work out is what are the things that add up to an R of less than one," Whitty said.

"That narrows our options quite significantly. We are going to have to do a lot of things for really quite a long period of time, the question is what is the best package. If you release more on one area you have to keep onboard more of another area so there's a proper trade-off, and this is what ministers are having to consider."

His comments came after the chief executive of the Swiss pharmaceutical giants Roche said this week that scientists would be unlikely to secure a vaccine before the end of 2020.

"I'm afraid that the most likely scenario is that we will not have a vaccine before the end of next year," Severin Schwan said on a Wednesday conference call, adding that an 18-month timeline is "very ambitious."

Go here to see the original:

Coronavirus: Chance of vaccine or treatment this year 'incredibly small' - Business Insider - Business Insider

Pharmacist Michael Witte, left, gives Neal Browning a shot in the first-stage study of a potential coronavirus vaccine at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle. Browning is the second patient to receive the shot in the study.(Ted S. Warren/AP)

Excerpt from:

Six coronavirus vaccines already being tested in humans - New York Daily News

Virus Vaccine May Be Ready for Mass Production By Autumn, Oxford Professor Says  Bloomberg

Read more:

Virus Vaccine May Be Ready for Mass Production By Autumn, Oxford Professor Says - Bloomberg

Updated April 23, 2020 06:37:18

With more than 115 coronavirus vaccines in development, one of the largest pandemic health innovation funding bodies has raised the alarm over equity of access if a vaccine finally arrives.

Jane Halton is the former head of the Australian Department of Health and the chair of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI).

"We now have to think about issues around vaccine sovereignty," she told 7.30.

"How do we ensure that the vulnerable populations around the world will get access to a vaccine?"

The organisation is attempting to avoid what happened in 2009, when wealthy countries including Australia entered into contracts with big pharmaceutical companies, effectively monopolising the H1N1 swine flu vaccine at the expense of poorer nations.

"Everybody will want this vaccine, everybody will want to be vaccinated to reduce their risk," she said.

"So we have to negotiate this."

It echoes the concerns of Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Laurie Garett.

"Without equity, pandemic battles will fail," he wrote.

"Viruses will simply recirculate, and perhaps undergo mutations or changes that render vaccines useless, passing through the unprotected populations of the planet."

CEPI is currently funding 10 vaccines for COVID-19 that Ms Halton said were not necessarily in the commercial interest of big pharmaceutical companies in recent years.

"A number of people were very worried that we weren't investing money in some potential disease causing pathogens, that no one was going to spend money on because there wasn't a commercial return." she said.

Some of these vaccine technologies were initially created to combat SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), although an effective, safe vaccine was never fully approved.

"We were lucky with SARS, we dodged a bullet," Ms Halton said.

"And I think many of us would say that the countries who experienced SARS have responded more quickly than others; they remember.

"But we tried to develop vaccines for SARS. And in one particular case, there was a vaccine that looked very promising.

"Sadly, it turned out not to be safe."

According to CEPI, there are six candidates in clinical development right now.

Two in the USA (mRNA-1273 and INO-4800), three in China (Ad5-nCoV, LV-SMENP-DC and a Pathogen-specific aAPC) and one in the United Kingdom.

According to the British Secretary of Health, the UK trial is expected to begin human testing today.

The Oxford University project, a collaboration between the university's Jenner Institute and Oxford Vaccine Group, hopes to produce a million doses of the vaccine by September.

The world's biggest pharmaceutical company, Johnson and Johnson, announced it would begin clinical trials of its vaccine this September with the view to producing 1 billion doses by next year, according to Paul Kershaw, head of the company's Asia Pacific Medical Affairs.

"We're accustomed to developing vaccines over a period of five, seven or even more years," he told 7.30.

"And so doing this in 12 to 18 months is an extremely compressed timeframe.

"It's basically an inactivated virus that allows us to deliver antibodies, creating the presence of antibodies which will fight the virus in patients.

"It's a very safe vector. It's something that we have experience with.

"We've used it extensively already to mount a campaign against Ebola in Africa."

But the process is long and extremely expensive, and companies will look to be the first to market and recoup costs.

"That is the nature of drug development. It's a risky business," Mr Kershaw said.

"We can't wait to finish the clinical trials and then start developing on manufacturing and distributing the vaccine. What we need to do is both of those activities in parallel."

It is possible that multiple vaccines might succeed, much like the way flu shots have different brands or ingredients in each country.

"It's entirely possible that there will be a couple of vaccines, possibly using different technology," Ms Halton said.

Mr Kershaw agrees.

"There will likely be a number of vaccines that become available," he said.

"And that's all the better. We're playing a part."

Topics:chemicals-and-pharmaceuticals,health,covid-19,epidemics-and-pandemics,medical-research,vaccines-and-immunity,australia

First posted April 23, 2020 04:57:42

Follow this link:

Trials for a coronavirus vaccine are underway, but will it be available to all? - ABC News

Hancock: UK human trials for coronavirus vaccine to begin on Thursday video  The Guardian

Follow this link:

Hancock: UK human trials for coronavirus vaccine to begin on Thursday video - The Guardian

At 70 least potential novel coronavirus vaccines are being developed by research teams across the globe, including in the U.S., U.K. and China, according to the latest report this month from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Several pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology firms have joined the race to find a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus, which has infected over 2.4 million people across at least 185 countries and regions, as of Tuesday, according to the latest figures from Johns Hopkins University.

The director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is also a member of the White House COVID-19 task force, stated: "It will take at least a year to a year in a half to have a vaccine we can use."

Here we look at some of the main potential COVID-19 vaccine developments currently in the pipeline.

Rearchers at Inovio Pharmaceuticals have developed the INO-4800 vaccine, which is given as a skin-deep shot instead of the typical deeper shot. The vaccine is in phase one of its clinical trials in Kansas City, Missouri, being conducted among 40 participants. The company is also working with China to begin studies there.

Earlier this month, Novavax (a Maryland-based biotechnology firm) announced its NVX-CoV2373 vaccine will begin its first human trial on 130 participants in mid-May, with preliminary results expected in July.

Pre-clinical studies found the vaccine "produces high levels of neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in animal studies," said Gregory Glenn, the president of research and development at Novavax.

"This is strong evidence that the vaccine created by Novavax has the potential to be highly immunogenic in humans which could lead to protection from COVID-19 and helping to control the spread of this disease," said Matthew Frieman, associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Johnson & Johnson, in collaboration with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (part of Harvard Medical School), has been looking at potential vaccine candidates since January this year.

Last month, the researchers identified a lead vaccine candidate, which could potentially see a vaccine be available for emergency use by early 2021. Clinical trials are expected to begin in September, with data on the safety and efficacy of the vaccine expected to be available by the end of the year, the company confirmed in a statement.

"Our goal is to enable the supply of more than 1 billion doses of the vaccine globally," vice chairman of the executive committee and chief scientific officer at Johnson & Johnson, Paul Stoffels, told Yahoo earlier this month.

Johnson & Johnson previously developed the Ebola vaccine, while its vaccine candidates for Zika, RSV, and HIV are currently in the second and third phases of their clinical development stages.

Last month, the U.S. began the first human trial for a potential COVID-19 vaccine. Developed by the biotechnology firm Moderna, the first phase of the trial for the mRNA-1273 vaccine is being conducted at Seattle-based Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute (KPWHRI).

Emory University's VTEU (Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Unit) in Atlanta, Georgia was added by the NIAID, which is funding the trial, as a second test site for the first phase of the study.

The trial will observe 45 participants over 14 months to test how various safe doses of the vaccine react and whether it kicks the immune system into action. The vaccine uses a segment of the virus' genetic code rather than a piece of the virus, which it is hoped will allow it to be developed more quickly.

"Finding a safe and effective vaccine to prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2 is an urgent public health priority. This Phase 1 study, launched in record speed, is an important first step toward achieving that goal," Fauci said in a NIAID statement last month.

Earlier this month, Sarah Gilbert, a professor of vaccinology at Oxford University, claimed that a vaccine for the novel coronavirus could potentially be ready by this September.

Gilbert and researchers at Oxford University's Jenner Institute and Oxford Vaccine Group have been developing the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine since January.

Working with a base vaccine for other similar coronaviruses, Gilbert's team managed to speed up a development process that would normally take around five years to around four months.

Earlier this week, she confirmed that her team is waiting for final safety tests and approvals for the clinical trials, which she hopes could begin by the end of this week. But she urged millions of doses of vaccine would have to be manufactured even before these trials are concluded.

"What we need from the [U.K.] government is support to help us accelerate the manufacturing," she said speaking on BBC One's The Andrew Marr Show.

"There aren't any manufacturing facilities in this country that at the moment can make very large amounts of the vaccine," she added.

Gilbert previously stated that she gives the vaccine an 80 percent chance of being successful based on evidence that she has seen.

China is looking at three potential vaccines, including one by Chinese biopharmaceutical company CanSino Biologics, developed in collaboration with the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology. The first phase of clinical trials for the team's Ad5-nCoV vaccine was launched last month.

Read more

Recruitment of volunteers for the second phase of clinical trials for the Ad5-nCoV vaccine has begun. "It's the world's first novel coronavirus vaccine to initiate Phase II clinical studies," Wu Yuanbin, an official from China's Ministry of Science and Technology, said at a press briefing earlier this month.

Another potential vaccine is being developed by Beijing-based Sinovac Research and Development Co., Ltd, while another is being studied by the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Both vaccine candidates were approved for the first phase of their clinical trials earlier this month.

The graphic below, provided by Statista, illustrates countries with the most confirmed COVID-19 cases.

Data on COVID-19 cases is from Johns Hopkins University unless otherwise stated.

Hygiene advice

Medical advice

Mask and glove usage

Read more:

Coronavirus Vaccine Update as 70 Potential Treatments Being Rapidly Developed Across the Globe - Newsweek