Washington: The US government will fund and conduct key studies on three experimental coronavirus vaccines, said the nation’s top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci.
“The coronavirus vaccine effort is progressing very well and we expect more than one candidate vaccine to be in advanced clinical testing by early summer,” Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN on Wednesday.
“This is good news for the overall coronavirus vaccine effort,” he said, reported Xinhua news agency.
Phase 3 trials, which typically involve tens of thousands of people and measure whether a vaccine is safe and effective, will begin with one by Moderna in July, then an Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in August and one by Johnson & Johnson in September, according to the CNN report.
Fauci said the funding decision came from the Department of Health and Human Services, in consultation with the National Institutes of Health and other agencies.
Call for more research on asymptomatic symptoms
In Geneva, the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that more research needs to be done to better understand the extent to which COVID-19 is being spread by people who don’t show symptoms.
“Since early February, we have said that asymptomatic people can transmit COVID-19, but we need more research to establish the extent of asymptomatic transmission,” the WHO chief said at a virtual press conference from Geneva. (IANS)
