Vaccine won’t be ready until next winter, warns expert

A PUBLICLY available vaccine for Covid-19 may not be ready until next winter, a Sage scientist has warned.

Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said last week he expected the vaccine would be ready “in the first few months of next year”.

But those expectations have apparently been dashed after Prof Peter Openshaw, of Imperial College London and a member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, said he expected an effective vaccine would not be rolled out to the public before winter 2021.

Prof Openshaw said he thought at least one vaccine trial would produce a positive result before Christmas, but even with “rapid scaling up”, vaccine programmes may not be available until September 2021 at the earliest.

“With all the vaccine trials now coming through which are scheduled to deliver a result within the next few months, I do feel that on the basis of what we know about the immune system that it’s likely that these immune responses that are being induced by these vaccines may be protective for at least a few months, possibly even years, we just don’t know yet, it’s early days,” he told Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday.

“I do think that we will probably have a positive result of at least one of these vaccine trials, probably more than that, by Christmas and that means that with rapid scaling up we might have vaccination programmes that can roll out to some parts of the world in the next nine months. Before the winter of 21/22 I hope that we should have vaccines that are effective.”

Meanwhile, Oxford University announced its vaccine trials are to resume, after a volunteer fell ill resulting in the trials being paused in the UK, Brazil, South Africa and the US.

Astrazeneca, the pharmaceutical company developing the vaccine, said safety reviewers had recommended to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency that it was safe to resume the British trials.