• Friday, March 29, 2024
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A lockdown world gets a jolt from hints of progress in Global race for Covid-19 vaccine

COVID-19 vaccine

The best of scientists working to get to the market a vaccine for coronavirus offer no guarantees but reports in the last two days they are making good progress in their various laboratories are enough to excite a world whose citizens have been hobbled in their homes for the last seven weeks.

On Sunday, the UK government brought cheering news it is expecting the partnership between Oxford University vaccine experts and AstraZeneca to make available 30 million doses of a vaccine by September.

Monday, Moderna Inc announced to their world that its vaccine candidate was doing well in human trials and it hopes to advance the vaccine into late-stage trials as early as July.

The news sent US futures racing higher.

Reports said the experimental vaccine from Moderna Inc. impressed in early signs that it can create an immune-system response in the body that could help fend off the virus, based on a small, early human trial.

The hints come from analyzing sampling of data from a small, first human trial of the inoculation.

The study was primarily designed to look at the safety of the shot and it showed no major warning signs in a small phase 1 trial, the company said in a statement Monday.

The trial is being run with the U.S. government, and Moderna plans to continue advancing it to wider testing.

Researchers found that at two lower dose levels used in the study, levels of antibodies found after getting a second booster shot of the vaccine either equaled or exceeded the levels of antibodies found in patients who had recovered from the virus.

The findings are based on results from the first eight people who each received two doses of the vaccine, starting in March.

Those people, healthy volunteers, made antibodies that were then tested in human cells in the lab, and were able to stop the virus from replicating — the key requirement for an effective vaccine according to the New York Times..

The levels of those so-called neutralizing antibodies matched the levels found in patients who had recovered after contracting the virus in the community.

The company has said that it is proceeding on an accelerated timetable, with the next phase involving 600 people to begin soon.

But U.S. government officials have warned that producing a vaccine that would be widely available could take a year to 18 months. There is no proven treatment or vaccine against the coronavirus at this time.