“We’re doing safety testing,” Gilbert said, “but we’re not concerned.”
Gilbert’s team has used the same technology for about 10 different vaccines, she said. The challenge that now arises is testing the vaccine even as virus infection rates vary.
“It’s going to be complicated trying to determine vaccine efficacy when the virus transmission in different places is going up and then going down again,” she said. “The trial has to be set up in the right place at the right time and that’s very hard to predict. That’s why we’re planning to do multiple trials in multiple countries.”
Another hurdle is money.
“We have some funding but we don’t have all of it yet,” she said. “You can’t just go and start manufacturing at large scale. You have to put a lot of things in place and that’s what we’re trying to do at the moment. It’s in the order of tens of millions of pounds.”
The WHO is creating a forum for everyone developing Covid-19 vaccines to share their plans and initial findings, according to Gilbert.
“Work is continuing at a very fast pace,” she told the Lancet medical journal, “and I am in no doubt that we will see an unprecedented spirit of collaboration and cooperation, convened by WHO, as we move towards a shared global goal of Covid-19 prevention through vaccination.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.