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LONDON: The University of Oxford expects to present the results of the late-stage trial of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate this year, raising hopes that Britain may start rolling out a successful vaccine in late December or early 2021 .
A vaccine that works is seen as a game changer in the battle against the coronavirus, which has killed more than 1.2 million people worldwide, closed swaths of the global economy and turned normal lives upside down. billions of people.
“I am optimistic that we could get to that point before the end of this year,” Oxford Vaccine Trial Lead Investigator Andrew Pollard told UK lawmakers on presenting the trial results this year.
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Pollard said this year will likely find out whether or not the vaccine worked, after which regulators should carefully review the data and then make a political decision on who should get the vaccine.
“Our two cents: We are getting closer, but we haven’t quite made it yet,” said Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group.
When asked if he expected the vaccine to start rolling out before Christmas, he said: “There is a small chance that that is possible, but I don’t know.”
The Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine is expected to be one of the first big pharma to be submitted for regulatory approval, along with the candidate from Pfizer and BioNTech.
“If I wear my specifications tinted pink, I hope we will see positive interim data from both Oxford and Pfizer / BioNTech in early December, and if we get it, I think we will have a chance to implement it before the end of the year,” said Kate. Bingham, chair of the UK Vaccine Task Force, to lawmakers.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said there was a possibility of a vaccine in the first quarter of 2021.
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“GAME CHANGER”
Work on the Oxford vaccine began in January. Called AZD1222, or ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, the viral vector vaccine is made from a weakened version of a common cold virus that causes infections in chimpanzees.
The chimpanzee cold virus has been genetically modified to include the genetic sequence of the so-called spike protein that the coronavirus uses to access human cells. The hope is that the human body will attack the new coronavirus if it sees it again.
If the Oxford vaccine works, it would eventually allow the world to return to some normalcy after the tumult of the pandemic.
When asked what success was like, he said, “I think the good thing is to have vaccines that have significant efficacy, so yeah, I mean, that’s 50, 60, 70, 80 percent, whatever the number is, it is a huge achievement.
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“It means, from a health system point of view, that there are fewer people with COVID entering the hospital, that people who develop cancer can undergo chemotherapy operations – it is a total change and a success if we meet those end points. efficiency “.
But Pollard, one of the world’s leading experts in immunology, said the world might not return to normal right away.
“It takes time to implement vaccines. Not everyone will take them,” he said. “We will continue to have people contract this virus because it is too good to transmit.”
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