Covid-19: University of Queensland scrapped off coronavirus vaccine trials after false-positive HIV results, is Uganda ready?
The federal government has scrapped a deal to buy more than 50 million doses of a potential coronavirus vaccine being developed in Australia.
The University of Queensland (UQ) and biotechnology company CSL on 11th December 2020, Friday morning announced they won’t progress trials of their Covid-19 vaccine candidate into the second and third phases after some participants returned false-positive results for HIV.
The National Security Committee, based on scientific advice, made the decision on Thursday to terminate the deal and remove the vaccine from the Australian government’s plan going forward.
The deadly Covid-19 pandemic hit the world from China at the end of 2019, later spread to the entire world.
Many countries lost thousands and thousands of people and many survived after weeks of serious illness battling with the deadly pandemic in hospitals.
In a statement on Friday, UQ and CSL said there were no safety concerns reported in the 216 participants in the first trial phase.
If the vaccine were rolled out to the wider population, however, it would require significant changes to well-established HIV testing and therefore the decision was made not to proceed with the trials, the statement said.
While it would be possible to re-engineer the vaccine in a bid to remove the possibility of false positives, UQ vaccine co-lead Paul Young said it was not possible within a short time frame.
“Doing so would set back development by another 12 or so months, and while this is a tough decision to take, the urgent need for a vaccine has to be everyone’s priority,” Mr Paul said.
Experts in Australia have had a recommended scientific experiment to scrape off the vaccine.
“What is really encouraging is that the core technology approach we used has passed the major clinical test,” reads the report.
“It is a safe and well-tolerated vaccine, producing the strong virus-neutralising effect that we were hoping to see.”
The government has previously said it wants to start rolling out a vaccine to the Australian community early in the new year.
Earlier this week, Britain became the first Western country to begin a mass-vaccination program against Covid-19 using a vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.
The scientific report of of the University of Queensland (UQ) and Biotechnology Company (CSL) about the failure of Covid-19 vaccine trials has brought in a heat debate mainly in the developing countries.
In the case of Uganda, it is not clear whether Uganda has the capacity to determine the fake, original and proved vaccines to immunise citizens.
The debate whether Ugandans will accept the Covid-19 vaccines or not may be a debate for another day.
Whisper Eye will keep you updated about how different countries deal with the Covid-19 vaccines as the pandemic threatens human race on the glob
