Britain Could Start to Roll out a COVID-19 Vaccine in Late December or Early 2021

The University of Oxford hopes to present late-stage trial results on its COVID-19 vaccine candidate this year, raising hopes that Britain could start to roll out a successful vaccine in late December or early 2021.

“I’m optimistic that we could reach that point before the end of this year,” Oxford Vaccine Trial Chief Investigator Andrew Pollard told British lawmakers of presenting trial results this year.

Pollard said working out whether or not the vaccine worked would likely come this year, after which the data would have to be carefully reviewed by regulators and then a political decision made on who should get the vaccine.

“Our bit – we are getting closer to but we are not there yet,” Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, said.

Asked if he expected the vaccine would start to be deployed before Christmas, he said: “There is a small chance of that being possible but I just don’t know.”

Work began on the Oxford vaccine in January. Called AZD1222, or ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, the viral vector vaccine is made from a weakened version of a common cold virus that causes infections in chimpanzees.

The chimpanzee cold virus has been genetically changed to include the genetic sequence of the so-called spike protein which the coronavirus uses to gain entry to human cells. The hope is that the human body will then attack the novel coronavirus if it sees it again.

Asked what success looked like, he said: “I think good is having vaccines that have significant efficacy – so whether, I mean, that is 50, 60, 70, 80 percent, whatever the figure is – is an enormous achievement.”

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