Oxford University to begin tests of its coronavirus vaccine on humans NEXT WEEK in hope of having a jab ready for autumn

Hopes of eliminating the coronavirus were raised today after leading British experts revealed trials of a vaccine would begin on humans next week.

Oxford University scientists are confident they can get jab for the incurable disease rolled out for millions to use by autumn.

Tests of the experimental jab on different animals have shown promise - and the next step is to use it on humans to prove it is safe.

The Oxford team are one of hundreds worldwide racing to develop a COVID-19 jab, which experts fear could take 18 months.

More than 70 vaccines are currently in development, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Three different groups - one in China and two in the US - have already began trials on humans

Oxford's vaccine programme has already recruited 510 people, aged between 18 and 55, to take part in the first trial.

They will receive either the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine - which has been developed in Oxford - or a control injection for comparison.

Professor Adrian Hill, who will lead the research, said: 'We are going into human trials next week. We have tested the vaccine in several different animal species.

'We have taken a fairly cautious approach, but a rapid one to assess the vaccine that we are developing.'

A COVID-19 vaccine would be the safest and most effective way of controlling the outbreak.

There are several vaccines currently in development though they need to be tested which can take many months.

If a vaccine is rushed without proper testing there may be side-effects and complications.

The team's vaccine comes from chimpanzees, who are injected with the coronavirus to produce antibodies that can be used to bolster the immune system of humans.

It is hoped the vaccine, developed by the Jenner Institute and Oxford Vaccine Group clinical teams, will be ready in September.

Speaking to the BBC World Service, Professor Hill explained they're trying to raise money to scale up the manufacturing of the vaccine.

He said: 'We're a university, we have a very small in house manufacturing facility that can do dozens of doses. That's not good enough to supply the world, obviously.

'We are working with manufacturing organisations and paying them to start the process now.

'So by the time July, August, September comes - whenever this is looking good - we should have the vaccine to start deploying under emergency use recommendations.

'That's a different approval process to commercial supply, which often takes many more years.'

Professor Hill added: 'There is no point in making a vaccine that you can't scale up and may only get 100,000 doses for after a huge amount of investment.

'You need a technology that allows you to make not millions but ideally billions of doses over a year.'

The Oxford team last week announced hopes to have the vaccine ready for autumn, saying they were '80 per cent' confident it would work.

Sarah Gilbert, a professor of vaccinology, admitted that this time frame was 'highly ambitious' many things could get in the way of that target.

The drug industry is hoping to shorten the time it takes to get a vaccine to market – usually about 10 to 15 years – to within the next year.

But public health officials say it will still take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine – despite human trials beginning. Britain's chief scientific adviser last month said that it would be at least 2021 before a vaccine was ready.

Leading researchers have called for healthy volunteers to be purposely infected with the coronavirus to speed up the race.

Drugs and vaccines tend to be tested in three stages before they get approved for human use. The first phase is a safety run.

Phase two trials involve more people, and scientists will work out the correct dosage. They will also test the vaccine against a placebo.

The final stage of testing is the real deal. It involves hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people across multiple sites for a long period of time. 

Three scientists, including Harvard's Professor Marc Lipsitch, last month suggested bypassing phase three to speed up the process.

Rolling all phases into a controlled study has the potential to slash the wait time for the roll-out of an efficacious vaccine, the trio argued

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Experimental coronavirus treatment remsvidir improves the condition of two-thirds of patients hospitalized with severe cases, new US study finds

The effects were however slow to emerge so any improvement might not be due to the drug.  It might have happened anyhow

The first results from an international experimental US antiviral drug are promising, even as a trial of the same drug in China shuts down.

More than half of a group of severely ill coronavirus patients from the US, Canada, Europe and Japan improved after taking remdesivir made by California-based Gilead Sciences.

Originally developed as a treatment for Ebola, the medication has been shown to fight against coronaviruses such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which is a cousin of the new virus.

At the same time, a trial in China testing the drug in those with mild symptoms of the virus was suspended due to a lack of eligible patients.

However, some analysts believe that the trial was suspended because the drug was not proved to be effective

Currently, there are no drugs are approved for treating COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.

At least five large studies are testing remdesivir, and the company also has given it to more than 1,700 patients on a case-by-case emergency basis.

In the study, whose results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Friday, 53 patients between aged 23 to 82 were studied,

All were hospitalized either in the US, Canada, Europe or Japan - and 34 were sick enough to require breathing machines. 

They were given the drug through an IV for 10 days or as long as they tolerated it.  

After an average of 18 days, more than two-thirds of patients, 36 patients, needed less oxygen or breathing machine support.

Nearly half of patients were discharged from the hospital.

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Hidebound, overcautious, NHS bureaucracy

The chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, has banned doctors from treating Covid-19 with anything other than paracetamol and in severe cases, oxygen.

Colleagues have rightly condemned this response, which ignores the experience of doctors overseas. Professor Whitty’s position is that British doctors may not use therapies that have not undergone double blind controlled trials here. This could condemn many thousands to avoidable death through a failure to recognise that different rules should apply when patients are dying at such a rate.

The drug hydroxychloroquine is well-known, with a well-understood side-effect profile. It is safe. It also has a recognised mode of action in preventing replication of the virus. Comparison of the death rates in South Korea and Italy strongly suggests that it works to dramatically reduce the death rate. Evidence from India is similarly encouraging.

What the letter appears to indicate is that the hidebound, overcautious, unimaginative approach of the NHS bureaucracy to the coronavirus may actually be jeopardising lives.

It’s true that the jury is still out on hydroxychloroquine’s efficacy in treating Covid-19. But it appears to have fared well in a number of small scale studies and an increasing number of doctors around the world have made it a key part of their treatment protocols.

Hydroxychloroquine — originally designed as an anti-malarial treatment – is often used in conjunction with zinc.

This is because chloroquine is a zinc ionophore – see this 2014 study by Jing Xue et al – which means it enables the body’s cells to absorb zinc. Zinc — as well as being effective in boosting the immune system — is thought to disrupt the most deadly phase of coronavirus, the cytokine storm, when the body’s immune system attacks its own healthy tissue.

An international poll of more than 6,000 doctors released Thursday found that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was the most highly rated treatment for the novel coronavirus.

I asked a senior NHS consultant if it were really true that only paracetamol and oxygen had been permitted for use in Coronavirus treatment in the UK.

He told me: “No one I know is using chloroquine but at this rate it seems likely that we’ll be trying it on spec, without the trials. Whitty is a good doctor, for sure, and if the anecdotal/cohort study evidence mounts from elsewhere, then it will come on. The Boris situation is a test, if he does deteriorate…”

This isn’t exactly reassuring, is it? In the U.S., when President Trump heard about the potential of chloroquine as a treatment for coronavirus, he successfully called for the drug to be fast-tracked through the regulatory system. (It has been permitted as a treatment for malaria — and other conditions such as lupus — for 75 years, but obviously not for Covid-19, which didn’t exist till last year).

Britain, on the other hand, remains in thrall to its stolid, sclerotic, overcautious, unimaginative, rules-bound public health bureaucracy. In normal times, this bureaucracy was merely inefficient, wasteful, and a massive drain on the taxpayer. But in extraordinary times like these, this public health bureaucracy has become a positive menace.

When all this is over, a serious investigation needs to be conducted into the performance of the National Health Service, Public Health England, and the rest of the public health bureaucracy in this crisis. If it turns out that because of its dogged obsession with procedure and correct form it denied to dying patients basic medicine that could have saved their lives, then I hope that heads will roll and that root and branch form will be instituted.

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Protesters flood the streets and block traffic outside Michigan's state Capitol to demand Gov. Gretchen Whitmer end her strict stay-at-home orders and chant 'lock her up'

Furious demonstrators gathered Wednesday at Michigan's state Capitol, creating a massive traffic jam filled with honking cars and flag-waving protesters in defiance of the state's stringent statewide stay-at-home orders - demanding that they are lifted.

The raucous gathering dubbed #OperationGridlock was organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition (MCC) in Lansing in protest at Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer’s lockdown rules that will last through April 30. 

Last Thursday she signed a new executive order tightening constraints by closing home-improvement stores, restricting interstate travel, and barring constituents from fleeing the heavily afflicted parts of the state to their cabins in rural Michigan.

Video and photos from the protest show residents wrapped in winter coats and hats carrying signs that say 'Stop the Fear', 'End the Lockdown' and 'Heil Whitmer', comparing the governor to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. 

Protesters, some bearing guns, waved American flags from the windows of the State Capitol building while others waved MAGA flags and wore matching red hats bearing the Trump slogan.

Those who were there complained that they could not get to the hairdresser or stock up on lawn fertilizer.

The demonstrators notably ignored social distancing measures and most were seen without protective masks or gloves, even though Michigan has the fourth-great outbreak of coronavirus in the country with over 28,000 infections and nearly 2,000 deaths. 

Three lanes of traffic were filled with lines of cars blaring their horns outside of the state building on Capitol Avenue Wednesday afternoon, with locals declaring they’re ready to get back to work and get back to their regular lives. Traffic was backed up for more than a mile in multiple directions in the protest. 

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer imposes one of the strictest lockdowns in the country

Signed an executive order extending Michigan’s stay-at-home order through April and imposed new rules

Some locals were seen shouting and jumping on top of their cars, calling for the Governor to be removed and lockdown restrictions lifted.

Others were heard chanting 'recall Whitmer', 'USA', and 'lock her up', outside the Capitol building.

Neither the Michigan State Police or the Lansing Police Department had reported any arrests by 2pm local time.

Last week Whitmer issued a new executive order. The new policy closed big-box stores that sell gardening and home-improvement goods, limited the use of motorboats, closed public golf courses, restricted interstate travel, and banned constituents from fleeing the areas of the state with concentrated COVID-19 cases to their second homes in more rural areas in Michigan.

She also banned any gatherings of people who are not a part of a single household.

The activists complained that the rules violated their civil liberties and freedoms, expressed anger over which businesses were allowed to remain open, and frustration over the cancellation of Easter and Passover services.

They believe people are smart enough to make their own decisions regarding the coronavirus epidemic.

'I’m a state representative from the 102nd district and I’m here to support my people. I have a lot of constituents down here right now,' State Rep. Michele Hoitenga said in an interview with a local station.

'They want to get back to work. They can’t access the website to get benefits, then they want to get back to work. We’re recommending we adapt to federal guidelines to do it safely,' she explained.

Most protesters expressed their desire to get back to work as unemployment in the country has skyrocketed by over 16million over the past three weeks.

'I'd rather die from the coronavirus than see a generational company be gone,' Justin Heyboer of Alto, Michigan, said to USA Today. His family has owned Wildwood Family Farms for four generations, which is suffering a major financial blow in light of the coronavirus crisis and lockdown. 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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