Vallance: Covid vaccine doses may be available for some by end of year

A few doses of an effective Covid vaccine may be available for use before the end of the year, Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser has said – but it is far more likely that any such breakthrough will happen during the first six months of 2021.

Vallance, charged with delivering the good news at the end of the dire warnings from himself and Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, said the UK was in a good position, with orders for vaccines from a range of companies. Whichever approach to a vaccine succeeds – there are four main technologies being employed in prototypes around the world – the government will be able to access one that works.

But he was not able to say which one it would be or exactly when. “There is good progress being made,” Vallance said. “Many vaccines now have shown they generate an immune response of a type that ought to be protective, and several vaccines are in very late stage clinical testing, aiming to show that they are both effective and safe.

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“We don’t yet know that they will work. But there is increasing evidence that it’s pointed in the right direction.

“It’s possible that some vaccine could be available before the end of the year in small amounts for certain groups, [but] much more likely that we’ll see vaccines becoming available over the first half of next year. Again not certain, but pointed in the right direction, which then of course gives the possibility of a different approach to this virus.

“But in the meantime, we’ve got to get control of this in the way that Chris has described in order to make sure that we can live with it in a way that’s sustainable and protects health and society overall.”

The first people to be vaccinated will probably be health and social care workers, as the World Health Organization recommends. After that would come the elderly and at-risk groups.

But the exact order of distribution will also depend on which vaccine comes first. Those being developed with an adjuvant – an in-built booster for the immune system – are better suited to the elderly population, whose immune system wanes with the years.

The UK has pre-bought six different vaccines, hedging its bets. The best-known is the prototype from Oxford University/AstraZeneca, which is in the final phase of trials and has also been pre-ordered around the world.

It is an adenovector vaccine, delivered by a harmless chimp virus. It looked to be storming ahead of others, but the trials were paused recently because of a volunteer who fell ill in the UK and was hospitalised with what was reportedly an inflammation of the spinal cord, called transverse myelitis.

The trials have now re-started in the UK, South Africa and Brazil, but are still on hold in the US, where the National Institutes of Health has said it is “very concerned”. It has been suggested it does not yet have enough information and is awaiting tissue samples from the UK.

In total, the UK has on paper 340m doses of Covid vaccines. It has also signed up to the WHO’s Covax initiative, which is a pooled buying enterprise and something like an insurance scheme.

Wealthy countries contribute to a pot of money being used to research and develop promising vaccines. When they come to fruition, those vaccines that work will be distributed equally between all the wealthy countries that have paid in and low-income countries that cannot afford to.