covid 19 research: Good news on vaccine search but still long way to go - WHO

Geneva: The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Monday (July 20) welcomed progress on research into vaccines to counter COVID-19 but warned there was still much work to be done.

Mike Ryan, head of the WHO's emergencies programme, welcomed news that AstraZeneca's experimental vaccine developed with Britain's Oxford University was safe and produced an immune response in early-stage clinical trials in healthy volunteers. Ryan told a media briefing in Geneva there were 23 potential vaccines in development with three making data available for examination by other scientists in peer reviews.

U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and German biotech firm BioNTech also provided additional promising data, Ryan said. "I think it is good news. I mean, effectively, we have 23 COVID-19 candidate vaccines in clinical development. And as of today, we add one candidate vaccine for which phase one clinical data is available. So we have three, which is available in peer review journals. Plus we have one other, the BioNTech, Pfizer product, which the data's available on prepublication. So it's great, first of all, to see the data coming through into peer review journals. I think the data is very new. We do welcome the study and congratulate our colleagues at the Oxford University's General Institute and the Oxford Vaccine Group. And and obviously our colleagues at AstraZeneca for getting this data out there. Again, this vaccine was given to 1000 healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 55 and certainly did not appear to have any serious adverse events other than the expected, in some cases, chills, muscle aches, headaches. And the vaccine did generate neutralising antibody, I think in all participants and in a very small number of participants that were given a booster dose, those responses were even greater. So in generating T-cell mediated responses and generating neutralising antibody, this this is a positive result. But again, there is a long way to go. These are phase one studies. We now need to move into larger scale, real world trials. But it is good to see more data and more products moving into this very important phase of vaccine discovery. And we congratulate our colleagues for the progress they have made."" Ryan added.

WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said:"With strong leadership, community engagement and a comprehensive strategy to suppress transmission and save lives. COVID-19 can be stopped. We do not have to wait for a vaccine. We have to save lives now. Make no mistake, we must continue to accelerate vaccine research while doing more with the tools we have at hand." Global infections stand at more than 14.5 million, according to a Reuters tally, with more than 600,000 deaths.