Frontrunners In Race For Covid-19 Vaccine

Paris, Dec 2 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 2nd Dec, 2020 ) :Dozens of companies, from biotech start-ups to Big Pharma, are in the race to develop a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine, both to meet urgent medical need and for the potential payday.

A US-German collaboration between Pfizer and BioNTech surged past a key milestone on Wednesday with Britain's announcement that it would begin rolling out its vaccine -- the first Western country to give the green light to an immunisation drive against the coronavirus.

Its drug is one of several candidate vaccines that have shown promising results in final stage clinical trials, raising hopes the a pandemic that has already killed nearly 1.5 million people worldwide can be tamed.

- How many in the pipeline? - The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified 49 "candidate vaccines" at the stage of clinical trials in humans by mid-November, up from 11 in mid-June.

Thirteen of them are at the most advanced "Phase 3" stage, in which a vaccine's effectiveness is tested on a large scale, generally on tens of thousands of people across several continents.

Two frontrunner vaccines -- by Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer -- have already sought emergency use approval on both sides of the Atlantic.

Pfizer and BioNTech have reported that phase 3 trials for their mRNA vaccine showed 95 percent efficacy in preventing Covid-19 symptoms and did not produce adverse side effects among thousands of volunteers.

Britain said on Wednesday that its National Health Service will begin with 800,000 doses "early next week" and ramp up to "millions" of inoculations by the end of the year.

BioNTech/Pfizer, which said they expect further regulatory decisions for other countries in the "coming days and weeks", expect to roll out 1.

3 billion doses by the end of next year.

US biotech firm Moderna has also said its vaccine showed almost 95 percent efficacy.

The company is on track to manufacture between 500 million to a billion doses globally in 2021, it said.

Results from a European project led by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca were more complicated.

Across two variants in the trials with slightly different protocols, the two-dose vaccine worked 70 percent of the time.

But in a part of the trial process that came about by mistake, a group whose first jab was a half-dose rather than a full one showed an efficacy rate of 90 percent.

In terms of logistics AstraZeneca has an advantage because its candidate can be stored at the temperature of a normal fridge.

Moderna's vaccine on the other hand must be kept at -20 degrees Celsius, while Pfizer's requires an even chillier -70C to remain viable.

Russia, which registered two Covid-19 vaccines before trials finished, has said that its Sputnik V vaccine is 95 percent effective according to preliminary data and can be stored in an ordinary fridge.

The country has started a mass vaccination programme of its military personnel.

Meanwhile, several state-run Chinese labs are also thought to have produced some of the more promising candidate vaccines.

China has been giving experimental Covid-19 vaccines to people including state employees and essential workers heading abroad since July.

The United States and Europe this week fleshed out plans to administer Covid-19 vaccines as soon as they gain approval, expected in the coming weeks.