Competition for human guinea pigs in Covid-19 hotspots – Wall Street Journal

The pharmaceutical industry has responded with unprecedented speed to try to find a vaccine that will be able to inoculate millions, if not billions, of people against Covid-19. Normally it takes between 7 and 10 years to develop a new vaccine, but this timeline has been cut to a year and less. There are more than 145 vaccines being developed against Covid-19 and 21 vaccines are in human trials, with a handful in the second and third phase of trials. The frontrunners appear to be: the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca that is currently used in human trials in South Africa; US drugmaker Moderna's vaccine; and biotech firm CanSino's vaccine development with the Beijing Institute of Technology. Whether any of these vaccines will be safe and effective is expected to be known sometime later in July. In the third phase of the trial, scientists will give the vaccine to thousands of people to be able to determine whether it protects against the coronavirus. As University of the Witwatersrand vaccine expert Prof Martin Veller pointed out to BizNews: it is important to do human trials in Covid-19 hotspots where there is an increased risk of infection to be able to determine the effectiveness of a vaccine. Scientists are not only involved in a race to be the first to develop a vaccine; the Wall Street Journal reports that medical researchers also find themselves in a race to get thousands of willing human guinea pigs to sign up for the later stages of the trials. – Linda van Tilburg

Coronavirus researchers compete to enroll subjects for vaccine tests

By Jared S. Hopkins and Peter Loftus| Photographs by Bill McCullough for The Wall Street Journal

Vaccine researchers are trying new tacks in an unprecedented effort to recruit the tens of thousands of healthy volunteers needed to finish testing coronavirus shots in late stages of development.

___STEADY_PAYWALL___