will be tested on 2 000 trial volunteers. The University of the Witwatersrand’s newly appointed dean of health sciences, and professor of vaccinology, Shabir Madhi, is the study’s lead investigator, with the South African Medical Research Council and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funding the trial.
Wondering why we’re doing a trial in the first place? Or how and when we’ll know if the vaccine being tested has been successful? From past infectious disease outbreaks, such as smallpox and the Spanish Flu, we’ve learned that if we don’t keep the reproductive rate beneath one, we will see repeated outbreaks. The reproductive rate is how many other people each infected person will infect. The reproductive rate of SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease Covid-19, is currently about 2.5.
. The vaccine is called ChAdOx1 nCov-19, because it is made from a virus called ChAdOx1, which is a weakened version of a common cold virus that can’t replicate. The vaccine has been engineered to produce a type of protein that is found on the surface of the novel coronavirus. Researchers have shown that the antibodies that are produced against this protein after natural infection are able to kill — or neutralise — the virus when tested in labs.