(RTTNews) – Australia will be one of the first countries to obtain the coronavirus vaccine (COVID-19) from the British biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in a statement.
The Australian has reached an agreement with the pharmaceutical company to obtain the COVID-19 vaccine from the University of Oxford, if the candidate vaccine AZD1222 is successful. AstraZeneca will present the vaccine in partnership with the University of Oxford.
As a component of the agreement, the government will offer the COVID-19 vaccine on a loose-released charge to Australia’s 25 million Australian Australians.
“The Oxford vaccine is one of the most complex and promising in the world, and as a component of this agreement, we have ensured early access for each and every Australian,” Morrison said.
The prime minister said he was also committed to ensuring immediate access to the vaccine for the Pacific circle of related countries, as well as for regional partners in Southeast Asia.
Nearly two hundred candidate vaccines are in stages of progression worldwide. The AstraZeneca vaccine is one of the leading candidates for vaccine. AstraZeneca may start administering doses in the UK from September.
The pandemic has killed more than 780,000 people worldwide.
In July 2020, the provisional effects of the existing Phase I/II COV001 trial, led by the University of Oxford, were published in The Lancet, which showed that AZD1222 tolerated and generated physically powerful immune responses opposed to SARS-CoV-2 in all participants evaluated.
Advanced Phase II/III trials are currently underway in the UK, Brazil and South Africa and are expected to begin in the United States, Japan and Russia. Results are expected by the end of the year.
Last week, the European Commission (EC) reached an agreement with AstraZeneca to obtain up to 400 million doses of its AZD1222 COVID-19 vaccine. The company has agreements with Russia, South Korea, Japan, China, Latin America and Brazil to increase the global source capacity of 3 billion doses of vaccines.