The vaccine from COVID-19 has already been created and tested: when will it be publicly available

Around 100 vaccines are being developed worldwide to control coronavirus. The UK is going to finish the tests before the fall, Germany is looking for volunteers, in the USA, billionaire Bill Gates has joined in financing projects. However, WHO is skeptical of speeding up trials: you should not expect the vaccine to appear in the coming year. Which countries are developing vaccines, at what stage are they, and what is the problem with using vaccines in practice, I understood LIGA.net.

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USA: vaccines tested, need at least a year

Back in mid-March, the United States announced the start of the first clinical trial of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus vaccines in humans. Tests take place at the Seattle-based Kaiser Permanente Health Research Institute in Seattle. For their conduct, 45 young and healthy volunteers were recruited.

Starting April 10, Inovio Pharmaceuticals announced the start of vaccine testing. 40 volunteers are given two doses of the INO-4800 vaccine.

Inovio researchers put a piece of the virus code into a piece of synthetic DNA, according to the New York Post. Introduced as a vaccine, the cells will operate as a mini-factory for the production of harmless copies of protein. In turn, the immune system will develop protective antibodies against them that will work if the real virus ever enters the body.

Even if early safety tests are successful, “it will be a year to a year and a half” before any vaccine is ready for widespread use. The US Food and Drug Administration has said a vaccine is likely at least a year away.

Billionaire Bill Gates, who is sponsoring seven of the "most promising" vaccine projects, also urges people not to raise expectations. According to him, vaccine production is unlikely to begin in September, Bloomberg writes. In the best case, it will be able to launch large-scale production of a vaccine against the coronavirus disease COVID-19 within a year.

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UK: human trials have begun

In Oxford, in the penultimate week of April, the first phase of a clinical trial of a potential vaccine in humans began. The vaccine was developed by the Edward Gene Institute of Vaccine Research in just 3,5 months.

ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine was created on the basis of a weakened version of adenovirus (colds) in chimpanzees. Scientists have added part of the genetic code of coronavirus to it.

About 1100 people will take part in the study. Half will receive the COVID-19 vaccine and the other half (the control group) will receive the MenACWY meningitis vaccine. None of the study participants will know which vaccine they received. Otherwise, the scientists say, it could influence their health behavior in the community after vaccination and could skew the study results.

How quickly it turns out to get the result depends on the level of virus transmission in the community: from two to six months.

Scientists say they are about 80% sure of success. They believe in this so much that they are already launching the vaccine in mass production. This is a risk if the vaccine does not work. But if so, then by September about a million doses will be ready, and then production will be accelerated.

The UK government is allocating £ 20 million (almost $ 25 million) to the Oxford project.

The country's Ministry of Health will allocate another 22,5 million pounds sterling ($28 million) to test another prototype at Imperial College London. Human clinical trials are planned for June.

Germany: allowed human trials

In Germany, the first approval for clinical trials of a possible vaccine has been issued. This was announced by the Paul Ehrlich Institute.

Permission was received from BioNTech. This is an RNA vaccine. First, 200 healthy volunteers aged 18 to 55 are vaccinated. In the second part, other people of this age group will be vaccinated, but with an increased risk of infection or severe course of COVID-19.

At the same time, the Paul Ehrlich Institute was warned that the vaccine is unlikely to become publicly available in 2020.

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China: three vaccines are being tested

China has approved three vaccine candidates against COVID-19 for testing. Beijing was the first in the world to reach their second phase.

Earlier than others, a vaccine based on an adenoviral vector was approved. It will be tested on volunteers until December 31, 2020. The process of testing an inactivated vaccine is also progressing rapidly. Such developments are carried out in particular by scientists in Wuhan and the Beijing company Sinovac Research & Development Co.

At the end of last week, the second phase of the human trials for a vaccine developed at the first epicenter of the epidemic began. It was created at the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products under the Sinopharm State Pharmaceutical Corporation of China. At the first stage, 96 people in three age groups received the vaccine. She showed good safety, although all volunteers are still under surveillance.

But it may take about a year to complete the tests and ultimately come to the conclusion that the vaccine is safe and effective.

The Chinese authorities, referring to the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control Gao Fu, do not exclude that for emergency use (not for everyone, but for special groups of people, such as doctors), one of the vaccines will be ready in September.

Gao Fu believes that Chinese scientists can produce a vaccine for a healthy population early next year.

Switzerland: want to be in time by October

The laboratory of Martin Bachmann from the Institute of Immunology at the University of Bern has developed an RBD vaccine. As an irritant for the body's immune system, the receptor binding domain (RBD) is used - that part of the protein spikes on the surface of the virus that attaches to receptors on the membrane of the victim cell and allows particles to penetrate it.

The laboratory created a vaccine prototype back in February, shortly after the SARS-CoV-2 genome was deciphered. They hope to successfully conduct clinical tests by mid-autumn and then begin vaccinating at-risk citizens.

Swissmedic (the regulatory body) said that October, of course, “looks very optimistic, but these dates are plausible.”

Israel: human trials begin in summer

In early April, Israel began testing a sample of a vaccine developed by the Israeli Institute for Biological Research. Tests are conducted on rodents in a biochemical laboratory for defense purposes.

The first phase of clinical trials of the vaccine in humans will begin in the summer. Tests will last another six to nine months.

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Australia, Netherlands: BCG vaccine tested

The first studies related to trials of BCG vaccine against coronavirus began in the Netherlands. Preliminary studies indicate that BCG can actively fight COVID-19. Research is carried out by the team of the Medical University from the city of Utrecht.

The vaccine has already been tested on thousands of medical staff in eight hospitals in the Netherlands.

The scientists of Australia went the same way. The tests are at a massive third stage: four thousand doctors were vaccinated. Scientists will monitor the result of vaccination throughout the year, so this is still the prospect of several months.

In the absence of evidence, WHO does not recommend BCG vaccination for the prevention of COVID-19.

Five facts related to the vaccine from COVID-19

Creating a safe and effective vaccine is the most reliable method of preventing any infectious disease. But there are nuances, Doctor of Medical Sciences, Professor at the Institute of Physiology Viktor Dosenko told LIGA.net.

Fact No. 1

Countries are speeding up vaccine trials, but they will not be able to achieve mass vaccination in a “shortened” time frame.

“It will take a year, two or even more. No one will make cuts in order to throw an untested product onto the market with an insufficient evidence base. So we agreed in the scientific and medical world, these are canons. Yes, people are dying. But vaccines must be tested,” he said.

Fact No. 2

Although it is possible that in an experimental form (for example, for doctors), vaccination will be launched in the fall. But it is certainly not a question of large-scale procurement by states. Most likely, this will look like a continuation of research on certain categories of people.

Fact No. 3

How a new coronavirus will behave during the development of vaccines is impossible to predict. For example, for his predecessor SARS-CoV-1 (epidemic of 2002-2003), the vaccine was never finished: the request simply disappeared.

“The first SARS caused an epidemic, killed a certain number of people - and disappeared, it’s gone,” the scientist recalled. He does not rule out that the second SARS could also disappear without a trace.

Fact No. 4

Alternatively, the virus may mutate, then people will need to be vaccinated every season.

“The SARS flu is still a long way off,” but if this happens and the vaccine has already been developed, then modifying it for new mutations will not be a problem.

Fact No. 5

It is highly likely that this wave of the epidemic will pass without a vaccine. Therefore, in parallel with vaccines, it is necessary to look for other treatment methods. There are currently 997 clinical trials on COVID-19 being conducted worldwide. In Ukraine there is only one.

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