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Guwahati: With the entire world waiting with bated breath for a vaccine solution to the COVID-19, the editor of the medical journal The Lancet created a buzz on social media after announcing on Twitter that the result of the Oxford COVID-19 vaccine study would be released on Monday.
"Tomorrow. Vaccines. Just saying," Richard Horton tweeted on Sunday, causing much excitement in the social media sphere. The World Health Organisation (WHO) is currently tracking around 140 vaccine candidates, out of which around 20 have entered human trials.
Sinovac Biotech, a Chinese company, is moving into phase III trials in Brazil. At the same time, the University of Oxford/AstraZeneca is in a combined phase II/III trial in the United Kingdom and has recently gone into phase III trials in South Africa and Brazil.
German firm BioNTech is also collaborating with pharma major Pfizer to develop a vaccine for the Covid-19. The US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) has given its permission to the companies for two investigational vaccine candidates being developed to help protect against SarS-CoV-2.
Vaccines provide thehuman immune system with harmless copies of an antigen, which is a portion of the surface of a bacterium or virus that the immune system recognizes as foreign. A vaccine may also provide a non-active version of a toxin - a poison produced by a bacterium - so that the body can devise a defense against it. Vaccines typically have to follow higher safety standards than other drugs because they are given to millions of healthy people.
It needs mention here that the vaccine testing is a four-stage process. Firstly, preclinical testing is conducted on animals. Then, phase I trials are conducted on a small group of people to check for safety. The Phase II trials are expanded safety trials, and the Phase-III trials are conducted on a large group of people to confirm the efficacy of the vaccine.