The only way for the world to go out again without fear of social contacts is through the existence of a vaccine for the new coronavirus. In Portugal, the Prime Minister has said that he does not count on having a vaccine within a year or a year and a half, so it is with this scenario that the gradual return to (new) normality is working. In the UK, however, the scientific community is committed and more optimistic. This Friday, the Government announced the creation of a group and work that brings together the various scientific vaccine development projects for Covid-19, with state funding.
And although the British government is also playing with less than optimistic scenarios – of the existence of a vaccine within a year or 18 months – the researchers at Oxford University, who are part of this taskforce, are confident that the vaccine they are working on will be available to the public by this September. That is, in time for next winter. The deadline, however, is not consensual in the scientific community, with other research groups pointing to mid-2021 as the most reasonable deadline.
The working group will consist of 21 research projects, and includes members of the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and the British medical foundation Wellcome Trust and will be led by the British government’s leading scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, and expert Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy England’s medical director. Together, they will receive funding from a British investment fund worth £ 14 million (about € 16 million) to develop “treatments and vaccines quickly”. The idea is to develop the vaccine and get it to reach the general population as soon as possible.
“British scientists are working as fast as they can to find the vaccine against the new coronavirus, which will save and protect people’s lives. We support all your efforts, ”said Minister Alok Sharma this Friday at the usual briefing in Downing Street, quoted by the Guardian, where he stressed that the working group now created is the “key” to coordinate all these efforts, so that the vaccine reaches the market as soon as possible. The consensus among experts is that only a truly credible vaccine can enable various countries to truly lift measures to contain social distancing safely.
Although the period of one year to 18 months is the scenario considered more “reasonable” by the British government itself, there are teams within this taskforce who believe they get there sooner than that. This is the case of professors Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford, whose vaccine project will enter the human testing phase this month, who believes he may have a vaccine in September. “The goal is that we have at least one million doses available around September, and from there we start to produce faster,” he told the Guardian.
In addition to the £ 14 million that the government announced this Friday it will allocate to this taskforce, had previously announced, in March, a total of 250 million in funding to help international efforts to develop a vaccine, with 10.5 million strictly allocated to six specific projects.
This funding, says the Guardian, includes funding for a possible antibody drug that is being developed by PHE (Public Health in England), which is studying a drug that could work both as a prophylactic (preventive) drug as a medicine to treat infected patients. Another part of the funding goes to a study entitled Virus Watch, conducted by the University of London, which proposes to test 10,000 participants each time they report any symptoms potentially related to Covid-19 and, from there, track all your movements through smartphone applications.
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