First human trials of new vaccine to begin in Oxford TODAY

Sarah Gilbert, who is the professor vaccinology at Oxford University and is leading the efforts for the new vaccine, said that all being well the trials would begin today. 

She explained that vital safety steps were not being missed out, despite its rapid development. 

She told BBC Breakfast on Monday that her team have gone through stages of vaccine development that usually takes five years in just four months.

However, she said that none of the normal safety steps have been missed out, explaining: "The very careful, controlled manufacturing of the vaccine – all of that is still being done."

It is difficult to know when a vaccine might be ready though, Professor Gilbert said earlier int he week, as there are many complex stages in vaccine development.

These start with immunising healthy 18 to 55-year-olds, before moving into older age groups, looking at the safety and immune response to the vaccine.

"That's important because it's the older population that we really need to protect with the vaccine," she said.

Read more: Last week Professor Gilbert said she was 80% sure that the new vaccine would be successful 

"But with vaccines in general, you get not so good immune responses as the immune system ages, so we need to find out with this vaccine how good it's looking in older people compared to younger people, just by measuring the immune response to the vaccination."

Half of all the trial volunteers will get the new coronavirus vaccine and the other half will get a vaccine licensed to protect against meningitis.

Volunteers will not know what they are given, she said.

"Over time, as people become infected, or have symptoms of coronavirus, they will come to us to get tested, and we will arrange to have them tested very quickly and when enough people have become positive for the coronavirus, the statisticians will look at which groups those people were in, to find out 'were they in the group that had the coronavirus vaccine or are they all in the group that had the meningitis vaccine?'.

"Obviously we're hoping for the infections only to happen in the meningitis vaccine group. And if that's the case we will then be able to say that this vaccine works, at least in the age range that we've vaccinated."