Doctors developing a coronavirus vaccine in England may know how effective it is within six months, according to a report Thursday.
Researchers conducting a clinical trial at Oxford University aim to release the vaccine to a million people by September, professor John Bell, who is working on the project, told The Telegraph.
Bell said “several hundred” people have already been injected at a trial that began last week — and that his team hopes to see signs of it working by mid-June.
On Thursday, UK officials announced a partnership between the college and and the biopharmaceutical firm Astra Zeneca — with the goal of rapidly rolling out a vaccine.
“They vaccinated several hundred people now, and we hope to get some signal about whether it’s working by the middle of June,” he told BBC Radio 4 Today. “Once we get an approval by the regulators. we don’t want to have to go back to the beginning and work out how we manufacture it at scale.
The initiative involves preparing facilities to produce 30 or 40 million doses of the vaccine in the first wave of release, Bell said.
He added, “We are very conscious of the fact that we do not want a lag in the availability of this vaccine between developed countries and developing countries.”