Updated: March 1, 2021
A clinical trial for an experimental COVID-19 vaccine is beginning in the United States on Monday in an effort to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.
COVID-19 is a respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus which began in China and has spread all over the world, prompting the World Health Organization to label it a pandemic.
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A report quoted a government official under anonymity as saying that the first participant in the trial will receive the experimental vaccine on Monday.
The report quoted the same official as saying that 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 believe it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine.
“Testing will begin with 45 young, healthy volunteers with different doses of shots co-developed by NIH and Moderna Inc. There’s no chance participants could get infected from the shots, because they don’t contain the virus itself. The goal is purely to check that the vaccines show no worrisome side effects, setting the stage for larger tests,” the report said.
It added that “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”.
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