Oxford Vaccine Is Expected to Be Ready For Mass Use Later This Year

“Secondly, you want to be able to show whether the vaccine works, and the size of the trial actually is determined largely by what the attack rate of the disease is in the study population.”

“And so, if you’ve got a very, very rare disease, you need an enormous trial size, in order to be able to show whether the vaccine works. But in a situation like that at the moment coronavirus, depending on which region or country you are in, the size of the trial could be smaller or bigger just depending on how many cases are happening in that community at the time,” Pollard said.

“There are a number of trials that we’re running from Oxford here in the UK, in Brazil, and also in South Africa, and the combined size of those three trials together is around about 20,000 people, and AstraZeneca are moving forwards in their trials in the US, hoping to start enrolling 30,000 people,” he added.

“So within the trials of the vaccine that was developed here at Oxford University, we’d expect to have perhaps 50,000 or more people in the trials in total.”

Regarding the reports involving the US emergency authorization for the Oxfords coronavirus vaccine, Pollard explained: “Emergency use authorizations are well established by regulators both in the United States and in Europe; in fact, you may be aware just this week, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted emergency use authorization for plasma therapy.”

“So the process of going through emergency use authorization in an emergency is well established but it still involves having carefully conducted data, just as we are collecting information about the vaccines in clinical trials that are conducted rigorously and evidence that it actually works.”
“And so, for our suite of trials that we’re running from Oxford, we would expect to, first of all, have safety data and then evidence that the vaccine actually works,” he said.

“And before anything were to progress from there and of course it’d be AstraZeneca who would then take that forward to regulators.”

Progress has definitely been made regarding the coronavirus vaccine, so fingers crossed we’ll have it by the end of the year, as recent data seems very promising. Researchers ar Oxford are optimistic and we should all be the same.

However, don’t forget that vaccines usually take several years to develop and hit the market, and even then, there’s no certainty that they will work.