US Begins Testing A COVID-19 Vaccine On Humans Today, Bringing Hope To Mankind

Today, the first participant will receive an experimental dose in a clinical trial for a COVID-19 vaccine in the US, a US government official revealed.

The trial is funded by the National Institutes of Health and carried out at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute, Seattle. The official revealing the trial remained anonymous as the plan wasn’t supposed to be announced to the public.

According to public health officials, it will take between 12 and 18 months for a potential vaccine to be fully validated.

The trials will start with 45 young, healthy volunteer participants who will take different doses of shots, which Moderna Inc and NIH co-developed. Participants will not get infected with COVID-19 from those shots as the shots don’t contain the coronavirus. The goal of this testing phase is just to make sure the vaccines don’t show worrisome side effects, after which there will be larger tests.

Many research groups from across the globe are working night and day to create a vaccine for the coronavirus as the COVID-19 pandemic has been spreading and continues to grow fast. Notably, they are working on different kinds of vaccines, shots that are developed from new techs are faster to make and may also be more potent. Some researchers are even working on a temporary vaccine, those that protect people’s health for one or two months for instance so they can wait for a long-lasting one.

At the same time, Inovio Pharmaceuticals aims to start testing the safety of its vaccine in April on a number of volunteers at a testing center in Missouri and the University of Pennsylvania, US. Then there is a similar study in South Korea and China.

However, even if the safety tests have good results, there are another 1 or 1.5 years to go before the vaccine can be widely used, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH. And manufacturers know they have to wait as additionals studies are required and we need to test the vaccine on thousands of people to know if it really protects them and causes no harm, but a frightened public may not be able to wait.

Despite that, this is still a considerable achievement. Currently, there aren’t any proven treatments. Scientists in China have been testing a combination of HIV drugs to fight COVID-19 along with an experimental drug called remdesivir that was developed to cure Ebola. Meanwhile, in the US, researchers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center started testing remdesivir on some American COVID-19 patients.

US President Donald Trump has recently urged for a vaccine and hopes to see a vaccine really soon. I mean, all of us do hope for the same thing at this moment, don’t we?

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