Oxford, England - The University of Oxford's Covid-19
vaccine trial has only a 50 percent chance of success as the
coronavirus seems to be fading rapidly in Britain, the professor
co-leading the development of the vaccine told the
newspaper .
Adrian Hill, director of Oxford's Jenner Institute, which
has teamed up with drugmaker AstraZeneca Plc to develop
the vaccine, said that an upcoming trial, involving 10 000
volunteers, threatened to return "no result" due to low
transmission of Covid-19 in the community.
"It's a race against the virus disappearing, and against
time", Hill told the British newspaper. "At the moment, there's
a 50 percent chance that we get no result at all."
The experimental vaccine, known as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, is one
of the front-runners in the global race to provide protection
against the new coronavirus causing the Covid-19 pandemic.
Hill's team began early-stage human trials of the vaccine in
April, making it one of only a handful to have reached that
milestone.