It seems that the United States has developed COVID-19 vaccine as President Donald Trump has just tweeted ‘Great News On Vaccines!’
Great News on Vaccines!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 15, 2020
Well, if this is true, it is going to be a piece of big news as the entire world has been working day and night to develop a vaccine to fight the deadly coronavirus which has claimed lots of lives around the globe.
While it is yet to be officially confirmed that the US has developed the COVID-19 vaccine, people have already started expressing their concern and asking how safe it will be for humans.
“We need to be sure this vaccine will be safe and effective. This is good news and I know that working with the world’s brightest minds we can end this virus together! Let’s work together — as one American people!,” Dr. David Samadi wrote on Twitter.
The news comes at a time when Russia recently claimed that it has successfully completed tests on volunteers of the world’s first vaccine against COVID-19.
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the apex body in India for the formulation, coordination, and promotion of biomedical research, has set August 15 deadline for the launch of indigenous vaccine ‘COVAXIN.’
This led to a controversy following which the Union Health Ministry officials clarified that the intent of setting up the deadline was “only to expedite duly approved clinical trials without compromising on safety and security concerns.”
Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation lists 160 vaccines currently in development at various stages of research and development. This makes it the biggest vaccine development effort in the history of mankind while a pandemic is still on, the Live Mint quoted Indian virologist Shahid Jameel, as saying this.
Of these, 139 are currently in “preclinical evaluation” stages, which means that vaccine candidates are being tested on animals.
Of the 21 vaccine candidates listed by the WHO in clinical trial stages, two have reached phase III – the private Chinese company Sinovac’s trial of an inactivated vaccine in Brazil, and the British-Swedish drug company AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford’s viral vector vaccine that is in a Phase II/III trial in England and in Phase III trials in Brazil and South Africa.
Leading drug company Zydus Cadila today said it has started human clinical trials of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate ZyCoV-D.
In the phase of trials, the company will be enrolling over 1,000 subjects across multiple clinical study sites in India, it said in a regulatory filing.
The adaptive phase I/ II human clinical trials of ZyCoV-D have commenced with the first human dosing, it said, adding that “the adaptive phase I/II dose escalation, multi-centric study will assess the safety, tolerability and immunogenicity of the vaccine.”
Earlier this month, the company had received approval from domestic authorities to start human trials for its COVID-19 vaccine contender – the second Indian pharmaceutical firm to get such nod amid a surge in novel coronavirus infections worldwide.
The American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. and the European biotechnology company BioNTech SE said on July 13 that two of their experimental COVID-19 vaccine candidates have got “fast track” status from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The ‘fast track’ status is designed to speed up the regulatory review process of the new vaccines that have shown good results during trials.
Earlier the study described the preliminary clinical data for the candidate vaccine – nucleoside-modified messenger RNA (modRNA), BNT162b1.
It said the number of antibodies produced in participants after they received two shots of the vaccine candidate was greater than that reported in patients receiving convalescent plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients.
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