London: Oxford University's progress towards a vaccine for the novel coronavirus has raised hopes that there could be a product on the market by the end of the year. The UK government has already pre-ordered 100 million doses of the vaccine.
The team at Oxford published the results from early-stage, human clinical trials in the British medical journal The Lancet. They say their vaccine triggered an immune response, producing effective antibodies to fight the virus. Those antibodies were detected for 56 days, after which the trials so far ended.
With such a short trial period, it's unclear whether or not the antibodies produced by the candidate vaccine last longer than 56 days, or indeed whether the vaccine will provide any form of long-term protection.
Carsten Watzl, a professor of immunology and scientific director at a Leibniz Research Center in Germany, says "there's no data about that yet. They measured the antibodies for 56 days. But the question remains: How long do these antibodies last?"
Recent studies in China and Germany have indicated that the number of antibodies generated from a natural infection with the novel coronavirus drop within two to three months after patients recover.
A vaccine would have to provide much longer protection than that, not least because it would be logistically difficult and expensive to vaccinate whole populations several times per year. Spource: https://timesofoman.com/:
