Coronavirus vaccine update: How far along is the research? | COVID-19 Special

We need to develop a vaccine we need to produce it and to deploy it in every single corner of the world. It’s a race against time! There’s little chance of beating the corona virus without a vaccine. But when will it be ready?Scientists across the world are working around the clock to develop one, from China to the United States, Germany and Britain. New technologies are helping speed things up more than a hundred potential vaccines are in development. Some are already at an advanced stage and are being tested on volunteers. The pace may be unprecedented but there’s still a long way to go in the battle against the outbreak. The world is waiting for a vaccine! In a moment we’ll talk to the internationally renowned medical researcher Jeremy Ferrara but first an update on where we stand around the world more than a hundred projects have been launched to develop a vaccine against the novel coronavirus but it’s still far from clear which candidate will succeed Bo ntek was the first German company to be approved for clinical trials the 200 healthy volunteers taking part in the trial are receiving what’s known as a gene based vaccine this type of vaccine introduces genetic material RNA from the pathogen into the body the RNA tells the body cells to recreate a non disease-causing portion of the virus antigens these antigens then spark the immune system into creating antibodies that fight against the real covert 19 the biotech company cure vac based in southwestern Germany is also working on a vaccine like this amazingly just one gram of their active ingredient could be used to create a million vaccine doses this a blob we think this RNA technology will provide a very good and fast solution the two companies were hoping to put their vaccine on the market this year but they’ll more likely need a year to a year and a half Chinese firms Sinha vac is meanwhile creating an inactivated vaccine using this more than a hundred year old method the viruses are simply killed and introduced into the body the danger here is that the immune system can overreact so much that it kills the person but experiments on mice and monkeys have shown that this vaccine can be a very successful and effective solution it’s now being tested on humans as well the advantage of an inactivated vaccine is that it’s extremely simple to produce and can be done in almost any country a team at UK’s Oxford University is hoping to have a vaccine ready by September 2020 they’ve opted for a third method live vaccines with viral vectors this method uses a different harmless virus as a vehicle it’s genetically modified so that the surface imitates the typical structure of the corona virus it spikes when the virus disguised in this way is administered the immune system forms antibodies that would also fight the real covert 19 although no one knows if the UK’s active ingredient even works yet a company in India has already started mass-producing it and I don’t know by internationally-renowned a medical researcher Sir Jeremy Faris are very good to have you on the show starting on an optimistic note when do you expect we’ll have a vaccine ready being optimistic I would say we’ll have a vaccine that we believed to be safe and which we’re starting to see evidence if we hope would be protective I would hope we would have that in the in the in the fourth quarter of 2020 but that’s only the start because having a vaccine at that stage is not enough to vaccinate everybody all over the world and that’s where we need to work too so so that is gonna take a few months later and we need to do all of these things in parallel rather than all in sequence to get there as quickly as we can to offer vaccines to the world you mention a very sensitive point there because let’s say that we do get a vaccine this year who is going to be in charge of distributing it and how can we ensure that that will be fair that’s a great question and and of course it has to be fair we we have to believe in a world which is equitable and which access to this vaccine because this pandemic is affecting the whole world that this access to that to any vaccine is not determined by any of our abilities to pay for it it isn’t right it’s not fair it’s equitable it’s not the sort of world we want to live in so making a vaccine available to everybody wherever they are is the crucial element here and pay tribute to the German governments in this in the a support force epi which is driving this process but also the World Health Organization who have made it very clear that having a vaccine for the rich world is not enough and it’s not it’s not good enough we have to commit having a vaccine for the world right and the European Union certainly says that we need a global response to the pandemic there’s even an event coming up next week how do we get everyone on the same page it’s difficult to get everybody on the same page it’s difficult at the best of times but of course as everybody knows we’re living in very tense geopolitical times at the moment again the European values the values of solidarity and the values of equity and the values of a sense of fairness are absolutely critical here and and the role the European Commission has played alongside Germany alongside France alongside many of the European nations the UK as well has very strongly argued for not just a science not just the development not just a manufacturing in this vaccines but that we’re absolutely committed to making this available globally and and the leadership from the European Commission on this has been has been the reason we’re going to be having this pledging conference next week it would not have happened without that leadership right and it’s also of course about funding you yourself say that the world needs at least eight billion dollars to get the crisis under control now we’ve seen huge stimulus packages aim to boost economies worth trillions of dollars so eight billion can’t be such a big problem can it it isn’t I mean the the latest figure I heard at the weekend when joining a group of economists and people from federal reserve’s and and central banks was that the world is losing somewhere in the region of about 200 billion euros dollars a week just play that out across the whole world and play it out for just the three or four months that we’ve already been through let alone the continued destruction going forward the investment of eight billion dollars now which is just the stuff that will not get us to a vaccine to everybody in the world but it will get us to the next critical stage which is doing the science the research and the manufacturing of those early magazines it is a tiny amount of money I cannot imagine a better investment at the moment than putting that money into science in order to develop both of that the vaccines and the therapeutics when we’re losing the world is losing two hundred billion dollars a week so eight billion dollars to get us out of this pandemic would be one of the best investments the world has ever made indeed now we started this on a positive note let’s get a bit more realistic perhaps what happens if we fail to get a vaccine anytime soon well that’s why this this conference is so important because it’s not just concentrating on vaccines it’s it’s vaccines it’s Diagnostics and it’s also drugs and therapeutics we need all three i I was a junior doctor that started the HIV epidemic and many people stopped talked in the late 1980s about how a vaccine for HIV was going to change the world and indeed it would but some 30 or 40 years later we don’t have a vaccine for HIV indeed we don’t have a vaccine for tuberculosis or malaria either and yet actually through good Diagnostics through good health systems through good Public Health and through having good drugs we’ve been able to keep the horrible pandemics of HIV TB and malaria although we haven’t finished those pandemics we’ve have we have made great progress in bringing them under control so there is no single magic bullet here there is it’s not all about vaccines it’s not all about Diagnostics it’s not all about drugs it’s about all of those and also social sciences that brings it all together we would be unwise to put everything into the vaccine camp and not also produce the drugs and diagnostics that are required all right sir Jeremy for our there thank you so much for your time and for your input thank you very much time for some of your questions now and today focusing on animals he is our science editor Derek Williams [Music] can the coronavirus spread in animals yes coronaviruses are what are sometimes described as being pretty from misc Lluis and there’s every indication that the pathogen that causes kovat 19:00 originated in bats and and possibly jumped from there to another intermediate species before jumping on to humans we now know that different species of felines can also get it and transmit it to each other testing with house cats showed that and the evidence was backed up by the news that a number of lions and tigers at the Bronx Zoo in New York had contracted the disease probably from an asymptomatic zoo keeper it’s clear that we can give the virus to other animals but it’s not yet clear whether or not at least our domesticated animals can give it to us what should i do first when I come back from walking my dog I can’t bathe him daily in previous epidemics involving related coronaviruses like SARS dogs owned by people who had become sick didn’t grow sick themselves or transmit the virus to other humans that seems to be holding true for kovat 19 as well as to the question of whether SARS co2 could stick to your dog’s fur that also appears to be fairly low risk as as Harris porous which will tend to absorb and trap any virus that said when you’re outside with your animal the same social distancing rules should really apply to them as apply to us can I use an ultraviolet lamp to sanitize a room what effects would that have on my body ultraviolet or UV is the short wavelength invisible radiation emitted by the Sun that causes sunburn and after prolonged exposure can cause skin cancer so high doses of it are dangerous to living things and also to viruses we can make lights that emit those specific wavelengths and they’re often used in hospitals or labs under controlled conditions to kill microbes in the air and on on surfaces there are companies now selling devices for decontamination in the home but experts at the w-h-o and elsewhere have warned against using them especially when it comes to trying to sanitize for example your hands through direct exposure to UV light the problem is basically that in order to damage any virus the radiation would also have to be intense enough to damage you UV radiation is a potentially dangerous tool and trying to use it in the home is a lot more likely to do harm than good now until there’s a vaccine the social distancing is key to keeping the pandemic under control that’s tough around national holidays so the Swedish city of lund camera authorities covered the Central Park with chicken dung tens of thousands of Swedes usually gather there to celebrate while Perkis nights but not this year after the council spread a ton of the stinking manure on the Lord’s the perfect deterrent