Coronavirus: Oxford vaccine ‘has only 50-per-cent chance of success’

‘We’re in the bizarre position of wanting Covid to stay, at least for a little while,’ says researcher

Oxford University scientists working on a coronavirus vaccine have said it may only have a 50-per-cent chance of success.

Project leader Professor Adrian Hill, of the university’s Jenner Institute, said the realisation of a working vaccine was far from guaranteed and cautioned against “over promising”, in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph.

But the warning has not deterred pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, which announced a $1.2bn (£986m) deal to produce 400 million doses of the vaccine first created in Professor Hill’s Oxford lab.

Pascal Soriot, the chief executive of the drug company, told The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday that British people would be among the first to gain access to the vaccine, which could be ready by September.

Mr Soriot said: “Yes, we have actually received an order from the British government to supply 100 million doses of vaccine, and those will go to the British people.

“And there’s no doubt, starting in September, we will start delivering these doses of vaccine to the British government for vaccination.”

But Mr Soriot said the vaccine being rolled out in autumn would still depended on two factors – firstly that the drug works, and secondly that there remains a sizeable proportion of the population in the country with Covid-19 – otherwise it will be difficult to demonstrate the efficacy of the inoculation.

He said: “The vaccine has to work and that’s one question, and the other question is, even if it works, we have to be able to demonstrate it. We have to run as fast as possible before the disease disappears so we can demonstrate that the vaccine is effective.”

The Jenner Institute and the Oxford Vaccine Group began development on a vaccine in January, using a virus taken from chimpanzees.

Following an initial phase of testing on 160 healthy volunteers between 18 and 55, the study is now set to progress to phases two and three, which involve increasing the testing to up to 10,260 people and expanding the age range of volunteers to include children and the elderly.

Professor Hill told The Sunday Telegraph that if the virus’s spread was too low, not enough of the volunteers will catch it and the trial will be unable to definitively say if the vaccine works.

“It’s a race against the virus disappearing, and against time,” Professor Hill said. “We said earlier in the year that there was an 80-per-cent chance of developing an effective vaccine by September. But at the moment, there’s a 50-per-cent chance that we get no result at all.

“We’re in the bizarre position of wanting Covid to stay, at least for a little while.”

Additional reporting by Press Association