The point of a vaccine is to stop people catching the disease and, as importantly, stop people spreading the virus to others.
So far, this vaccine is 0 for 2.
As for lessening the effects, it was reported that the sacrificed monkeys had the virus in their lungs but did not have pneumonia...given that they appear to have been killed a very short time after exposure that may be it just hadn’t developed yet....
Reading some of EX’s previous posts it may be that existing drugs are already more effective at treating the disease than a vaccine that doesn’t immunise.
I think you've made too much of an assumption there; the vaccine is behaving as some in the group predicted, that does not make it unusable or even ineffective.
Now's your chance to step step forward and do or die!!
Oxford team seek 10,000 volunteers to test vaccine
new
Tom Whipple, Science Editor
Friday May 22 2020, 12.00pm, The Times
Health
The vaccine was the first in Europe to enter human trials, and the initial results are being analysed
JUSTIN SETTERFIELD/GETTY IMAGES
About 10,000 people are due to receive
the Oxford vaccine at sites around the country as trials move into their final phases.
The announcement that scientists are recruiting volunteers en masse confirms that the coronavirus vaccine remains on course for completing testing in the autumn — a target that many experts considered too ambitious. If it is shown to work by then it will be the quickest development of a vaccine in medical history.
The Oxford team say that whether or not they meet their goal of proving it works by September — when the government has pledged to have 30 million doses ready — will depend on the rate of transmission of the virus in Britain.
coronavirus
A brief explanation of vaccines
A vaccine is a harmless version of a virus that ‘trains’ your immune system to respond quickly if you are ever infected with the real thing
Human cell
Vaccine
Antibody
1
A vaccine containing weakened bacteria or protein mimicking a virus enters the body
2
After several days, your body starts to produce antibodies to protect you
3
These antibodies are specific for this virus and your body remembers them
4
If you are exposed to the virus in future your body is now primed to respond quickly
In order to be approved for wider use, enough of those given the vaccine need to have been naturally exposed to the virus to be sure that it is effective.
“We are in full flight in a pandemic,” Andrew Pollard, head of the Oxford vaccine group, said. “You have to have evidence of the vaccine working. Now it’s certainly possible if there’s enough transmission that we could know by September. But if there is not much transmission it will take longer.”
The vaccine was the first in Europe to enter human trials, with 1,000 subjects recruited for the initial testing phase in April. The results of that trial are being analysed to assess whether the vaccine is safe and whether it induces an immune response. Separately, a smaller trial is beginning in older adults, whose immune systems often respond differently to vaccinations.
Most scientists believe that any individual vaccine has a relatively low chance of success, but that with more than 100 teams looking for a vaccine around the world one is almost certain to be shown to work. The Oxford team is using a generic “platform” technique that has been shown to work in the past and senior figures in the public health community believe that theirs is one of the most promising vaccines.
Professor Pollard said that finding out whether it works or not by the autumn will depend on everything going perfectly. “Talking about autumn is really the optimistic hope that there’s no bumps in the road. It requires a number of different things to go well.”
Tests of the vaccine in macaques have produced mixed results. Although the monkeys did not develop infections in their lungs the virus still replicated in their upper respiratory tracts.
Professor Pollard said that this was not unexpected and certainly did not justify stopping trials. The way in which the monkeys were tested — by spraying a large dose of the virus into their noses — meant that it was hard to interpret the results.
“It’s very difficult to know whether that large dose that goes into the upper airway into the nose of the animals is anything like what happens in humans,” he said.
“What the vaccine was definitely able to do was prevent pneumonia and prevent actually any virus in the lungs at all. If we have a vaccine that can prevent pneumonia, severe disease, hospital admission, ICU admission and death, then that’s pretty good. That, I think, would be enough for all of us.”
