‘Covid-19 vaccine could be ready within a year if trials are successful’

A vaccine for Covid-19 could be ready within a year if trials go well, a leading UK research scientist has sad.

Professor Robin Shattock, who leads a team working to produce a vaccine at Imperial College London, said that enough of the vaccine would be available for every person in the UK if trials go 'really well'.

There is no certainty that the vaccine being developed with work though as its effectiveness depends on the level of immunity needed to prevent infection, which makes chances of success difficult to predict.

Speaking on Sky News' Sophie Ridge On Sunday, Professor Shattock said: 'So we anticipate if everything goes really well that we'll get an answer as to whether it works by early next year.

'And we have put in place the infrastructure to make that vaccine for the whole of the UK.

'So, assuming that the funding is there to purchase that vaccine, we could have that vaccine rolled out across the UK in the first half of next year.'

15 volunteers have already been given the trial vaccines and testing is expected to ramp up to include as many as 200-300 new participants in the coming weeks.

Professor Shattock told the programme: 'If you only need a very small amount of immunity, I suspect most of the vaccines that are being developed will actually work, but if you need a very strong immune response or particular quality of immune response, we'll see that actually it will be shaking out to some of these candidates.

'We hope we will be the candidate, one of the candidates, that is successful, but there's no certainty with any individual approach.'

Another vaccine is also being developed at Oxford University and the combined efforts of both teams has left Professor Shattock feeling optimistic that a vaccine could be ready soon – especially as the number of cases are falling.

He said that the although there is no certainty that either the vaccine at Imperial or Oxford could not work, the likelihood of both failing he says is 'very low'.

However, given the importance of a vaccine and the pressure to develop one quickly, Professor Shattock said that any vaccine will have to be introduced cautiously because normal full trials will not have taken place.

He said: 'I think the wire pressure is actually there's such a push to develop a vaccine that normally, we would study a vaccine for two years before we made it widely available to the general public,' he told the programme.

'And of course, we won't have two years of safety for this vaccine or any of the vaccines that are being developed.

'And so they still will need to be introduced very cautiously, with long-term follow up, as that pressure to get a vaccine in and to get economies up and running is really very strong.