Source: Wikipedia.
Well worth the read if you need a bit of good news. From the New York Times.
Jenner Institute, Oxford, England, has a vaccine well along in the pipeline. Known to be safe. Effective in monkeys, which is as close as you can get to a test on humans, short of a test on humans.
Large-scale human trial (6000 persons) scheduled for next month. The deal is, because this is deadly, they can’t do what they did to the monkeys, and just expose a bunch of people to a deadly dose of the virus. Instead, they have to vaccinate a bunch of people, placebo-vaccinate a second group, and then look at the naturally-occurring infection rates in the two groups. Hence, testing it on 6000 persons.
They should know for sure whether it works or not, on humans, June/July of this year.
Today’s news is that they’ve lined up a manufacturer.
They skipped Phase I trials, which is my bugaboo about US vaccine research. Phase I trials costs lives, this context, because delay is costly. This approach had already been shown to be safe, and so the British government gave them approval to proceed. Makes me wonder what it must be like to have a national government that can act rationally.
