Results of human Covid-19 vaccine trial could be available in June, expert says

At the end of April a team of researchers at Oxford started testing a Covid-19 vaccine in human volunteers. “We really need a partner to do that and that partner has a big job in the UK because our manufacturing capacity in the UK for vaccines isn’t where it needs to be, and so we are going to work together with AstraZeneca to improve that considerably.” He rejected the idea of challenge therapy – that would deliberately infect healthy volunteers with coronavirus – and said there should be results on the vaccine trial by using normal exposure to the virus, if you keep your head down. On Thursday the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said licensed drugs to treat Covid-19 could be available in the next few months, and that a vaccine might be approved in early 2021, in a “best-case scenario”. Dr Marco Cavaleri, who heads the European regulator’s vaccines department, told a media briefing that approving medicines to treat Covid-19 might be possible “before the summer”. Speaking at a webinar of The Royal Society of Medicine, he said: “I’m hoping maybe the start of next year we might have something if it pans out.