Drugmaker AstraZeneca said on Thursday that it had secured orders for at least 400m doses of an as yet unproven Covid-19 vaccine being developed with Oxford university and would begin delivering them in September.
The company said it had also received more than $1bn in funding from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (Barda), a unit of the US health department, to develop the coronavirus vaccine.
The UK group is one of several big drugmakers racing to develop a vaccine for the virus, which has killed more than 300,000 people and crippled the global economy.
Although still at an early stage, the Oxford prototype has been one of the world’s fastest-moving potential solutions to combat the pandemic.
Some 300m of the 400m doses are set to go to the US, where the Department of Health and Human Services announced it was collaborating with AstraZeneca to make the first ones available as early as October.
The effort is part of US president Donald Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” initiative, which aims to quickly scale up vaccine production in the US.
