American drugmaker Pfizer has claimed that a COVID-19 vaccine could be ready by October-end this year. The pharmaceutical company is conducting clinical trials with German firm BioNTech on several probable vaccines in Europe and the United States.
“If things go well, and the stars are aligned, we will have enough evidence of safety and efficacy so that we can…have a vaccine around the end of October,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla
The report also cited UK drug firm AstraZeneca’s head Pascal Soriot who said that one or more coronavirus vaccines could start rolling out by the end of this year (2020). AstraZeneca is working in partnership with the University of Oxford to develop and distribute a vaccine being piloted in Britain.
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“The hope of many people is that we will have a vaccine, hopefully several, by the end of this year,” Sorio was quoted in the news report as saying. He, however, added, “we are running against time”.
The report also underlined the warnings from experts around the challenges that could be “daunting” as it evaluated that approximately 15 million vaccine doses would be needed to stop the COVID-19 pandemic.
The news report also quoted Soriot as saying that one of the concerns in developing a vaccine was the falling transmission rates as it would be hard to properly carry out clinical trials of the COVID-19 vaccine in a natural setting.
The report further added that globally over 100 labs are working to develop a vaccine against coronavirus, out of which 10 have reached the clinical trial phase. COVID-19 has claimed more than 3.5 lakh lives and infected over 5 million people globally so far.
