Donald Trump hails vaccine progress after positive trial results
A number of promising developments related to coronavirus vaccine developments announced today have met with the approval of US president Donald Trump.
Using his favoured platform Twitter, Trump wrote: “Great News on Vaccines!”
It is unclear exactly what the president was referring to, but the tweet followed the news that drug firm Moderna’s experimental vaccine had produced immune responses in all 45 volunteers of an early stage trial.
Volunteers who got two doses of the Moderna vaccine had high levels of virus-killing antibodies that exceeded the average levels seen in people who had recovered from Covid-19, the team reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The news prompted global markets to jump, with Moderna shares up 16 per cent in pre-trading.
There was also positive news from the UK, where the initial findings of the University of Oxford’s coronavirus vaccine trial are expected to be reported later this week.
Writing in a blog post, ITV political editor Robert Peston said that there would be “positive news soon (perhaps tomorrow)” on the tests for the vaccine, which is backed by drugs firm Astrazeneca.
Although it is yet to publish the findings from the initial trials, scientists have already moved on to conducting phase three trials to test the vaccine in a larger number of people over the age of 18.
Earlier this month developers said that they were pleased by the immune response the treatment had produced so far.
Last month Astrazeneca’s chief executive Pascal Soriot said that the vaccine would likely produce an immune response in people lasting a year.
The firm has said it is on course to deliver 2bn doses of the drug, which is considered one of the best bets in the attempt to find a cure for the new disease, by the end of the year.
A vaccine is widely considered the most likely way to put an end to the pandemic, which has now killed over 575,000 people worldwide.