Scientists at Oxford University hope to have a million doses of a coronavirus vaccine by September and hundreds of millions by the end of the year.
They are one of a group of research teams that will receive funding from a new government taskforce set up to find a vaccine.
In a breakthrough that could change the world, scientists at Oxford University are 80 per cent sure they've got a Covid-19 vaccine
"It’s a single-dose vaccine so you don’t have to get multiple shots and it's very manufactureable,” says professor Adrian Hill, the Oxford team's lead researcher.
And he's confident the vaccine will be available by September after human testing which starts next week.
“We’ve been able to develop it in three months since the virus was discovered to make the vaccine, test it on animals find that it's safe and manufacture it to a standard so we can start testing people next week and aim to have a thousand people a month later,” says professor Hill.
Most experts have said a vaccine would take 12 to 18 months to develop.
For more than 800 years Oxford's made a remarkable contribution to science, including developing penicillin during World War II which has saved countless lives.
The British government today injected NZ$30 million dollars into finding an antidote.
“Producing a vaccine is a colossal undertaking, a complex process that will take many months. There are no guarantees but the government is backing our scientists, betting big to maximise the chance of success,” says British Business Secretary Alok Sharma.
Across the globe more than 70 scientific teams are trying to do in months what would normally take many years and by doing that, injecting a bit of pace into what critics say has been a critically slow response.
“Where were the system errors that led us to have probably the highest death rates in Europe? And we have to face the reality of that. We were too slow with a number of things,” says professor Anthony Costello with the Institute for Global Health.
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