A clinical trial will be conducted on Monday evaluating new vaccine designed to protect against the coronavirus, according to a government official of United States. The first participant in the trial will receive the experimental vaccine on Monday, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
According to the official, “The National Institutes of Health is funding the trial, which is taking place at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle.” Public health officials said that “it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine.”
Testing will begin with a 45 year young, healthy volunteers with different doses of shots co-developed by NIH and Moderna Inc. There’s no chance that participants could get infected from the shots, because they don’t contain the virus itself. The aim is purely to check that whether the vaccines show worrisome side effects or not, setting the stage for larger tests.
Dozens of research groups around the world are racing to create a vaccine as COVID-19 cases continue to grow. Importantly, they’re pursuing different types of vaccines – shots developed from new technologies that not only are faster to produce than traditional inoculations but might prove more potent.
Some researchers even aim for temporary vaccines, such as shots that might guard people’s health a month or two at a time while longer-lasting protection is developed. For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia or in extreme cases, death also.