UK to start testing of Coronavirus vaccine on Thursday

The United Kingdom has said that it will start the testing of Coronavirus vaccine on Thursday.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock made the announcement, saying he is “throwing everything at” the country’s efforts to create a Covid-19 vaccine .

Hancock speaking at a news confrence said: “Nothing about this process is certain. Vaccine development is a matter of trial and error and trial again. That’s the nature of how vaccines are developed.”

He said he had told Prof Gilbert and Imperial’s Prof Robin Shattock that the government will “back them to the hilt and give them every resource they need to give them the best possible chance of success as soon as possible”.

The health secretary made clear that he believes the UK stands to reap a gigantic economic windfall if it is the first to reach the holy grail of a vaccine which could protect the whole world against Covid-19.

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Setting out the possible timeframe for a successful vaccine to be made available to the public in the UK, and eventually around the world, a member of the Oxford team, Prof Andrew Pollard, told Sky News: “If you had a sailing wind and absolutely nothing goes wrong in all of that complex technical process and you have all the facilities available, you could have millions of doses by the autumn of this year.

“But to the very large scale, there’s a huge technical effort to get there and I think it’s unlikely that that could happen before the end of this year.”

He explained: “If the trials are successful there’s a big technical hurdle to upscale doses of the vaccine to the millions, tens of millions or even billions that would be needed for the world.

“It’s a very different manufacturing process to be able to make such large volumes of vaccine. The capacity to do that round the world is quite limited.”

Prof Pollard said the Oxford project had been given a headstart by work already done on the coronaviruses Sars and Mers following outbreaks in recent years.

“When this new virus emerged there was already work going on in Oxford on Mers coronavirus and a vaccine was being trialled on humans,” he said. “What happened was that the genetic code from the new coronavirus was discovered in January and it was possible to go back to that genetic code and make these new vaccines very rapidly.

“They’ve been developed in the laboratory and taken to a manufacturing facility in Oxford to make the first doses ready for trials.”