Highlights:
- US Health Expert hopeful about a viable vaccine of COVID-19 by early 2021
- Many vaccine candidates are already in clinical trials
- 5-7 candidates are going into clinical trains at different stages
The top infectious disease expert of the United States of America Dr Anthony Fauci is saying that he is hopeful over the results from the ongoing clinical trials and the possibility of developing a viable vaccine for the novel Coronavirus by the end of 2020 or early 2021.
Dr Fauci who is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has said that the novel Coronavirus is likely to continue to emerge and the global collaboration and transparency will be key in dealing with pandemics in the future.
He said, “The lessons we’ve learned from the coronavirus is they have pandemic potential, they’re likely to continue to emerge. Good public health measures are critical in controlling them.”
Dr Fauci added, “Global collaboration and transparency are critical if we are to get a containment of this extraordinary assault on the human population, a viral disease that spreads rapidly and as a high degree of morbidity and mortality,” in his recorded remarks during an online session on “Confronting COVID-19 Through Innovation and Research: Lessons Learned from the Pandemic”.
The event was a part of a series on online dialogue by the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) dubbed ’75 for UN75: 75 minutes of Conversation’ which brings together academics, researchers and students from around the globe.
Dr Fauci, giving an overview of the pandemic and the efforts put in, in developing a vaccine, said, “we’ve adopted a strategic approach to get multiple candidates and there is more than one candidate vaccine to be conducted in trials in a harmonised way so that we use standard endpoints, standard and single data and safety monitoring board as well as identical immunological parameters that are measured so that you could bridge one study to another.”
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Currently, there are several vaccine candidates which are already in the clinical trial phase and some of those candidates have even completed phase 1/2 status, said Dr Fauci and added that there are trials which will be going into phase 3 by the end of July and then others will follow the suit in the months coming i.e. August, September and October.
Dr Fauci says, “hopefully we’ll be able to get some information, such as with this particular one representative vaccine… that we started here in January. Phase one looks good, very promising data on the induction of neutralising antibody” and will go into a trial at the end of July”.
He adds, as of now there are 5 to 7 candidates vaccine which are going into clinical trials at different stages.
The Moderna Coronavirus vaccine is displaying some promising results, “which makes me cautiously optimistic. Although you can never, ever predict with any certainty, whether a vaccine is going to be safe and effective.”
He added, “The early data on these trials have cautious optimism that we will be successful at least in developing a vaccine with some degree of efficacy by the end of the year, beginning of 2021,”.
Moderna has said that the firm has successfully completed enrolment of Phase 2 Study of its mRNA vaccine which works against COVID-19 and added that it has finalised the Phase 3 Study protocol based on the feedback it has received from the US Food and Drug Adminstration or FDA.
The randomised, 1:1 placebo controlled trails are expected to include close to 30,000 participants and are expected to be conducted in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), however, it is subject to regulatory approval.
The biotech company added that Moderna has complete the manufacturing of vaccine required to start the Phase 3 Study and the firm is on track to be able to deliver around 500 million or 50 crore doses per year which would be possible to be skyrocketed to 1 billion or 100 crore per year from 2021 from the company’s internal US manufacturing site and strategic collaborations.
As per the data, the deadly virus has infected more than 12 million or 1.2 core people around the globe and have claimed the lives of 552,380 people. The US is the worst impacted country in the world with over 3.1 million or 31 lakh reported cases and 134,867 deaths.
The novel Coronavirus which is said to have originated from the Wuhan City of China in December of 2019 has also battered the World Economy with the IMF or the International Monetary Fund saying that the global economy is bound to suffer a “severe recession”.
