American President Trump is hopping for a ‘October’ surprise to announce…
Oxford manufactured its own vaccine for use in the earliest small trial known as Phase 1. But for the far larger ongoing trials — involving tens of thousands of people — it turned to Advent, a division of a larger group known as IRBM, which for a decade has focused on making one particular type of experimental vaccines, using adenoviruses.
The notion of having a vaccine so quickly — when the process of experimentation and approval normally takes a decade — might have seemed fanciful at the beginning of the outbreak.
But given the scale of the pandemic and the speed at which scientists are racing ahead, European countries are lining up behind the Oxford University project, saying the early signals give grounds for optimism.
Last week, Italy, Germany, France and the Netherlands struck a dealfor 400 million doses of the experimental Oxford vaccine, which, if approved by regulators, would be produced by the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca. That company has also reached similar deals with Britain and the United States, where the Trump administration has supplied $1.2 billion in funding.
“We can’t imagine to only bet on this vaccine,” Italy’s health minister, Roberto Speranza, said in an interview. “But this is the vaccine our scientists think will arrive before the others. In this moment, there is no other company saying we could have the vaccine by the end of the year.”…