Potential coronavirus vaccine could prove efficacy in June; says Oxford professor

Sir John Bell, the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, announced on Sunday that researchers at the university working on a potential coronavirus vaccine would likely have an idea of its efficacy by June.

Bell told NBC that researchers hope to generate enough data from the second phase of trials to “get evidence that the vaccine has efficacy by the beginning of June.”

“We are gradually reeling it in, bit by bit and as every day goes by, the likelihood of success goes up.” Bell said.

If the disease “peters out in the U.K.,” the professor said: “we have sites already in play in other parts of the world where it’s active.”

“Coronavirus doesn’t mutate at the pace of flu as far as we can see but it’s also quite a tricky virus in terms of dictating long-term immune responses to it and as a result I suspect we may need to have relatively regular vaccinations against coronavirus going into the future,” Bell said.

“That of course remains to be seen but that’s my bet at the moment, is that this is likely to be a seasonal coronavirus vaccine.”

He further said Oxford team is making safety a priority even as it fast-tracks potential vaccines, adding that the researchers have done pre-clinical primate studies and taken other precautions, ensuring that “we’re being very careful.”

“I think we’ve got reason to believe that the efficacy, the efficacy of the vaccine in terms of generating strong antibody responses is probably going to be OK. The real question is whether the safety profile’s going to be fine. So that’s actually the main focus of the clinical studies,”