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Australia will produce 84.8 million doses of the Oxford University vaccine against the novel coronavirus from 2021 under a multi-million dollar deal, the government announced today.
The $ 1.7 billion ($ 1.04 billion) deal will allow Australian company CSL to manufacture a large part of the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. in addition to the vaccines being developed by the University of Queensland, Australia.
The 26 million Australians “will have early access to 3.8 million vaccines from Oxford University in January and February 2021,” the country’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced in a statement, stressing that vaccines must be safe. and meet health requirements before they are distributed to the population.
Development of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine is currently in phase three, while the University of Queensland has already demonstrated that its vaccine works in animals in preclinical trials.
Since the start of the pandemic, Australia has reported around 26,300 COVID-19 cases and more than 760 deaths from the disease, most stemming from an outbreak in Melbourne, Victoria.
The outbreak, which started in late June, appears to be on the wane, with Victoria today registering the lowest infection rate in more than ten weeks, with 41 new cases, plus nine deaths.
The covid-19 pandemic has already claimed at least 880,396 deaths and infected more than 26.9 million people in 196 countries and territories, according to a report by the news agency France-Presse (AFP).
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late December in Wuhan, a city in central China.
After Europe succeeded China as the center of the pandemic in February, the American continent is now the one with the most confirmed cases and the most deaths.
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