The race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine is on, as scientists work as quickly as they can to find a way to prevent the disease that has sickened more 4.4 million people and killed more than 300,000 worldwide.
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On Friday, Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, said the agency is planning to begin large-scale testing of several of the most promising vaccine candidates this summer. Despite such efforts, and despite statements from President Donald Trump this week, a vaccine most likely won’t be ready by the end of the year.
However, progress has been made: Scientists at the University of Oxford posted the results of a small study conducted in rhesus macaques monkeys to the preprint server bioRxiv. The study found that the experimental vaccine successfully blocked the coronavirus in the monkeys, which are considered to be good proxies for how drugs could work in people because the monkeys share a majority of their genes with humans. Clinical trials with the Oxford vaccine are ongoing in humans.
For more on vaccine progress, NBC News spoke with Dr. Gregory Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group. His team’s coronavirus vaccine is in the early, preclinical stages of development.
The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
NBC News: People are placing a tremendous amount of hope in a vaccine for COVID-19, an illness that in just over four months has infected millions worldwide and killed many thousands. From where you sit, is there evidence this virus could be prevented by a vaccine? Is it even feasible?
Poland: Definitely feasible. There’s nothing I see or know that would lead me to say that we can’t make a vaccine against this. The question of what kind of vaccine with what sort of effectiveness and what duration is another subject, but I think it is a key strategy in terms of developing population-level immunity.
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NBC News: Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH, said that even though it’s a “stretch goal,” his team is attempting to have hundreds of millions of vaccine doses available by January. What’s your reaction?
Poland: It is, as he admits, a gigantic stretch goal. What happens if there’s a better vaccine candidate doesn’t come until July, August, and wouldn’t get included [in the summer’s research trials]?
NBC News: What kind of timeline do you think is reasonable? Some have even said we could have one by this fall.
Poland: No, we will not. We are not going to have a vaccine this fall that has been adequately safety-vetted. Are we going to have one by the winter? Highly unlikely. The only way that can happen is if we d