To date, the novel coronavirus has killed about 590,000 people worldwide and infected close to 14 million in 196 countries since the outbreak first emerged in China late last year.
The stage three vaccines include a European project being developed at Oxford University in tandem with AstraZeneca and a Chinese variant from biopharmaceutical company Sinovac in collaboration with Brazilian research institute Butantan. Beyond the tests already underway, the WHO is monitoring a further 139 potential vaccines, which are still at the pre-clinical evaluation stage, involving testing on animals.
A vaccine injection 30 people which gets announced as a result - well, that's not a result, Dr Delfraissy noted. "The more candidate vaccines there are, and above all the more types of candidate vaccines, the greater the chance of getting somewhere" in terms of beating the virus, said Daniel Floret, vice-president of France's Technical Vaccination Committee.For now, only partial results have been made public, some dubbed "promising" by the firms behind them.
Daniel Floret agreed that many announcements are directed at least as much at the stock market, as at the general public. I am not that sure it is very realistic a vaccine will be there by the autumn - we have to temper such enthusiasm. That, he recalled, did happen in some tests on monkeys "during vaccine development tests for MERS-CoV and SARS," other strains of coronavirus.