WASHINGTON — British scientists developing a potential vaccine for the coronavirus hope to see a “signal” as to whether their vaccine candidate is working by June, one official involved in the effort told “Meet the Press” Sunday.
Sir John Bell, the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University where one of the leading efforts to develop a vaccine in underway, said that the prospects for its candidate are “pretty good” and that “as every day goes by, the likelihood of success goes up.”
The researchers hope to have enough data from their phase two trials that “we would get evidence that the vaccine has efficacy by the beginning of June.”
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The group at Oxford is one of the many racing toward finding an effective and safe vaccine for coronavirus alongside efforts to contain the spread of the pandemic.
More than 230,000 people have died of the coronavirus since January, and there have been more than 3.3 million reported coronavirus cases around the world, according to NBC News.
Bell said that in the rush toward a vaccine, it’s imperative to make sure that safety remains a top priority. He said the Oxford group has already done pre-clinical primate studies and taken other steps to make sure “we’re being very careful.”
“It’s a big issue for us is trying to be sure that we do this quickly, but we don’t miss out any of the key safety steps,” he said.
“I think we’ve got reason to believe that the efficacy, the efficacy of the vaccine in terms of generating strong antibody responses is probably going to be okay. The real question is whether the safety profile’s going to be fine. So that’s actually the main focus of the clinical studies,” he said.
With so many different trials and vaccine working groups across the globe, Bell added that the Oxford group wants to be sure that there can be “wide access” to their vaccine if it is ultimately proven successful.
“One of our ambitions is to make sure that there’s wide access around the globe should the vaccine be successful,” he said, adding they want to make sure developing countries aren’t “left behind in the manufacturing race to get more vaccine available.”