- A coronavirus vaccine being developed by Oxford University scientists entered Phase I clinical trials last week and could be ready to roll out by September.
- Six rhesus monkeys who were inoculated with the vaccine and exposed to heavy quantities of the novel coronavirus were still healthy 28 days later.
- 5,000 more participants will join the vaccine clinical trials in May.
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There has been one question on everyone’s mind since the novel coronavirus outbreak in China turned into a global pandemic: How long is this going to last? No one knows the answer to that question, but in all likelihood, life won’t go back to normal until a vaccine has been developed, tested, and produced at a large scale. The initial projections said that 12-18 months would be the best-case scenario for the development and rollout of a coronavirus vaccine, but the Edward Jenner Institute for Vaccine Research at Oxford University is trying to speed up that timeline.
The New York Times reports that the Jenner Institute had a head start on other labs as it had proved in earlier trials that inoculations using its vaccine (“including one last year against an earlier coronavirus”) were harmless to humans. This gave the Oxford group the ability to schedule tests of its vaccine with more than 6,000 people by the end of May, where other labs are limited to hundreds of test participants due to safety concerns.