May 18, 2020

expert comment about progress of COVID-19 vaccine candidates

There have been journalists questions about the progress of the COVID-19 vaccine candidates.

Prof Adam Finn, Professor of Paediatrics, University of Bristol, said:

“The likelihood of developing a vaccine against SARS CoV2 that has some measurable effectiveness and does not have unacceptable side-effects is pretty high although not certain.  After all, we have vaccines against most of the infectious diseases where a serious effort has been made to develop them – most but not all.  What is more difficult to predict is how long it will take to get there and how well the vaccine(s) will work to prevent serious illness and/or prevent infectiousness and how long any such beneficial effects would last after vaccine administration.

“If no vaccine becomes available or this takes a long time, then we are going to have to learn to live with the virus, just as we did with many other infections in the pre-vaccine era.  Life was more uncertain and death came sooner for a lot of people.”

Prof Stephen Evans, Professor of Pharmacoepidemiology, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said:

“September was always a “best-case” scenario for a vaccine being completely ready.  It depends on no stumbles at any of the multiple hurdles still to be reached and passed, so yes it’s optimistic.  Recruitment to the phase 1/2 trial has proceeded very well it seems and so no obvious stumbles have yet occurred, but it doesn’t mean there will be none.  We just don’t know.”

Prof Robin Shattock, Professor of Mucosal Infection and Immunity, Imperial College London, said:

“It’s highly unlikely that a vaccine will be available for use by September.  Generating doses of the vaccine is very different to having the necessary data to show that any vaccine is both safe and effective against COVID-19.  It will be critical to build the evidence base to show a vaccine works before it’s deployed.  This takes time and is dependent on seeing a difference in the number of infections between active vaccine and a placebo.  The lower the transmission rate in the UK, the longer it will take to generate such data.  While UK scientists are actively working on different vaccine approaches there is no guarantee that any individual approach will work.  It’s important not to create false expectations ahead of any break through, where the evidence will speak for itself.”

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

Prof Robin Shattock: “Working on a self-amplifying RNA COVID-19 vaccine, developed by Imperial College and funded by the UK government through different agencies including DHSC and NIHR.”