Everything you want to know about the Oxford Covid-19 vaccine

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Matt Reynolds, WIRED UK

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The coronavirus pandemic has brought a lot of smart news. But now, a trial with an experimental Covid-19 vaccine gives us an explanation of why to wait.

This story gave the impression in WIRED UK.

The effects of an Oxford University team show that their vaccine, developed in collaboration with the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, is in humans and causes an immune response. While this is far from a completely effective vaccine, it is a promising and important first step in getting one.

Here’s everything you want to know about the Oxford exam and what it means for the long-term Covid-19 vaccines.

The Oxford team found that their vaccine caused an immune reaction and produced no serious side effects. The vaccine has instigator neutralizing antibodies, the type that defends cells that oppose attacks through the virus, in at least nine out of ten people who won a single dose of the vaccine. The immune reaction peaked 28 days after the vaccine, however, it remained until day 56, which the last day covered through this clinical document. The exam is still ongoing.

The results are from a study involving 1,077 healthy adults aged between 18 and 55. Half of the participants received the new Covid-19 vaccine, while the other half—the control group—received a vaccine against a bacterial infection. Although no serious side effects were reported, around 70 percent of participants developed either a fever or a headache, although this was lower in a subgroup of participants who took a paracetamol around the same time they had the vaccination.

At this point, the test cannot tell us if other people who get the vaccine are protected against covid-19 contraction, however, it tells us that the vaccine should be used and that it causes an immune response.

Not yet, no. But this news is still significant. A less encouraging result at this early stage would have been really bad news. Now that we know the vaccine is safe to use and is able to kick the immune system into gear, we can start to explore whether it actually provides protection for people who are exposed to the virus.

Fortunately, these paintings are already underway. In Brazil, another 5,000 people were enrolled in a trial to determine whether other vaccinated people get the virus. A similar trial using the same vaccine is underway in South Africa. In the UK, another 10,000 volunteers are being recruited in the Oxford trial, but here the rate of underlying infection is relatively low, so there is a possibility that many vaccinated people may not come into contact with the virus anyway, and its protective functions. It would never be tested.

The test has serious limitations. More than 90% of the participants were Caucasian and the average age was 35 years. To make sure the vaccine is for everyone, you’ll want to try it in a much broader organization of others, adding the elderly and others with other fitness disorders and those of ethnically and geographically more varied backgrounds. The authors say that other people from these teams are recruited in ongoing trials in the UK, Brazil and South Africa.

That’s fair enough. We still don’t know whether having antibodies opposed to Covid-19 gives us immunity to the disease, although there may be some encouraging signs, at least in the short term. A small examination of the macaque monkeys found that animals can also catch Covid-19, but they cannot rejoin 28 days after recovery, and another test found that coverage lasted at least five weeks.

Of course, it expects any Covid-19 vaccine to offer coverage against the virus for more than five weeks. To be useful in practice, a supply coverage of the Covid-19 vaccine for at least six months, and preferably more than a year. This Oxford exam is not kind to this, but ongoing trials in the UK, Brazil and South Africa yield little on this main topic.

The vaccine is based on a genetically modified edition of the unusual, bloodless virus that infects chimpanzees. The virus has weakened so that it cannot make humans sick, and researchers have changed their genome to encode the complex protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the virus that motivates Covid-19. When this weakened virus entered the cells of vaccinated people, it led its cells to produce the complex protein, which in turn caused its immune formula to recognize the foreign protein and produce antibodies to protect against it.

Yaya. There’s more. The Oxford exam was published on the same day that a team from China also published promising effects of their own covid-19 vaccine exam. The Chinese vaccine was discovered in a weakened edition of the human blood-free virus that was also modified to supply the complex SARS-CoV-2 protein. The trial, which involved more than 500 participants, found that the vaccine was and, like the Oxford vaccine, also provoked an immune response.

The UK government has also been busy making sure the country gets access to vaccines as soon as they are available. AstraZeneca is working to produce 100 million doses of its vaccine for the UK, while the country’s government also has two other deals to procure another 90 million doses of vaccine from two different companies.

This story gave the impression in WIRED UK.

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