Coronavirus vaccine: Results of UK's first human trial could be ready next month

‘So far so good,’ says Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University

Results from the UK’s first human trial of a vaccine could be available by the middle of June, according to a member of the government’s coronavirus taskforce.

Professor Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, said researchers were waiting to see whether the volunteers catch the disease.

Several hundred people have been injected since testing began three weeks ago, with around 1,110 expected to take part in total.

Half receive the potential vaccine for coronavirus and the other half – the control group – receive a widely available meningitis vaccine.

Sir John said it was “so far so good” on the project lead by Oxford professor of vaccinology Sarah Gilbert.

“We’re now starting to wait for an advocacy signal to see whether people who’ve been vaccinated don’t get the disease, so that’s the next step,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

However there is a risk that there may not be enough active disease in the community for the participants to catch it naturally, said Sir John.

“We’re doing those calculations because we have quite good data now on how much disease there is around,” he added.

He explained that the researchers had discussed deliberately exposing people to the virus but had rejected the possibility because the risk of death would be too high if the vaccine did not work.

The team hope to produce one million doses of the vaccine by September and has formed a partnership with AstraZeneca to scale up manufacturing once it is approved by regulators.

Sir John said: “We also want to make sure that the rest of the world will be ready to make this vaccine at scale so that it gets to populations in developing countries, for example, where the need is very great.

“We really need a partner to do that and that partner has a big job in the UK because our manufacturing capacity in the UK for vaccines isn’t where it needs to be, and so we are going to work together with AstraZeneca to improve that considerably.”

Additional reporting by Press Association