The vaccine race
The HinduON January 11, the genetic sequence of the virus causing the outbreak of the respiratory disease in Wuhan, China, was posted by a team at Fudan University in Shanghai on GenBank, a global online database maintained by the United States’ National Institutes of Health. Within three months, a period equivalent to travelling at the speed of light for vaccine development, the Oxford SARS-CoV-2 vaccine was in the first stage of human clinical trials. The speed was partly possible because Moderna, like the Oxford team, had been developing a vaccine for MERS and was able to switch the MERS spike protein with the SARS-CoV-2 virus protein. One of them, CanSino, a Tianjin-based company, like the Oxford team, used recombinant viral vector technology to create a vaccine which had its first human trials in mid March as well and is now undergoing phase 2 clinical trials. The U.S. government has invested $1.2 billion in the vaccine that Oxford University is developing, an amount that will pay for the remaining costs of developing the vaccine, manufacturing enough doses for clinical trials in the U.S., as well as at least part of the cost of “at risk manufacturing”, or beginning to manufacture hundreds of thousands of doses of a candidate vaccine before clinical trials are completed, so that if the trials are successful the vaccine will be available immediately to the public.