Oxford coronavirus vaccine could go before regulators this year

Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, said that it is 'just possible' that there may be enough clinical trial data on Oxford University’s Covid-19 vaccine. 

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The comments, made on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, come after England’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty said it was 'foolish' to plan for a Covid-19 vaccine being ready before next winter.

Professor Pollard said: “I think that Chris Whitty is quite rightly being cautious, that it could take as long as that to first of all to demonstrate a vaccine works and is safe and then to go through the processes of regulators looking at that very carefully to make sure everything’s been done correctly."

Professor Andrew Pollard. Picture: PA

Professor Andrew Pollard

He added: “But it is also just possible that if the cases accrue rapidly in the clinical trials that we could have that data to put before regulators this year, and then there would be a process that they go through in order to make a full assessment of the data.”

Professor Pollard said he hoped that 50,000 people would be involved in the clinical trial for Oxford University's Covid-19 vaccine candidate.

But he stressed that the size of the trial 'isn’t really the issue', adding: “What you need is to have enough cases accruing during the time of observational in the trials.”

On reports that the US is planning emergency authorisation for the Oxford vaccine, he said: “Emergency use authorisations are well established by regulators both in the United States and in Europe; in fact, you may be aware just this week, the FDA (the US Food and Drug Administration) has granted emergency use authorisation for plasma therapy.

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“So the process of going through emergency use authorisation in an emergency is well established but it still involves having carefully conducted data, just as we are collecting information about the vaccines in clinical trials that are conducted rigorously and evidence that it actually works.

“And so, for our suite of trials that we’re running from Oxford, we would expect to first of all have safety data and then evidence that the vaccine actually works.

“And before anything were to progress from there and of course it’d be AstraZeneca who would then take that forward to regulators.”

He added that the timing of when the vaccine could become available 'depends very much on the number of cases that occur in the weeks and months ahead'.