There is only a ‘small chance’ that Oxford University’s coronavirus vaccine will be ready by Christmas, a chief scientist behind the jab has warned.
Professor Andrew Pollard said he was optimistic data showing his team’s vaccine works and is safe will be available by the end of the year.
But he poured cold water on the idea it could be rolled out to the most vulnerable groups in that time because of the time it takes time for regulators to scrutinise the trials and their findings.
Earlier today NHS England boss Sir Simon Stevens said the health service was ready and on standby to deliver a mass Covid vaccination programme by Christmas.
He said GP surgeries, pharmacies and mass testing centres – including at the mothballed Nightingale hospitals – were preparing to ‘fire the starting gun’.
But Kate Bingham, the UK’s vaccine tsar, claimed it was ‘more realistic’ to expect the first Brits to get their hands on a jab by early next year.
The Government announced over summer that a deal had been struck with AstraZeneca – the pharmaceutical firm which owns the rights to Oxford’s vaccine – to dish out 30million doses by September if it’s proven to be effective.
But Ms Bingham – chair of the Vaccine Taskforce – said problems with ramping up manufacturing capacity meant the UK would fall well short of this target. She predicted only 4million doses will be available before 2021.
Both Professor Pollard and Ms Bingham warned the first wave of vaccines would be good enough to allow society to return to normal, scuppering Boris Johnson’s promise that ‘life will return to normal next summer’.
Oxford University’s Professor Andrew Pollard (left) and Kate Bingham, the UK’s vaccine tsar, have warned a vaccine will most likely not be ready this year
The pair made the comments at a virtual House of Commons Science and Technology Committee today.
When Ms Bingham was asked by MPs if a vaccine could wipe out Covid-19 next year next year, she said: ‘Well, to wipe out coronavirus, I think [the likelihood is] very slim.
‘But to get a vaccine that has an effect both reducing illness and reducing mortality? Very high.’
Number 10 revealed in May that it planned to have 30million doses of Oxford University’s jab – the current global front-runner- ready for deployment by September if it proved to work.
The announcement at the time – when the country was in the midst of the catastrophic first wave – aimed to signal to the public that Britain would be prepared to mass vaccinate as soon as the jab was approved.
But Ms Bingham said Britain only had doses in the ‘low millions’ at the moment and would only be able to deliver about 4million by the end of the year, if regulators approve it by then.
She said: ‘That 30million doses [announcement] was assuming a linear yield on scale-up. So what happens is when you start at manufacturing these vaccines, you start at test tube levels and scale up sequentially ultimately until you get to one or two thousand litres [of the liquid which the vaccine lives in].
‘So the projections that were made in good faith at the time to get to 30million doses in September was assuming that absolutely everything would work and there would be no hiccups at all in terms of how you scale up.
‘And it hasn’t gone linearly – and it’s not through lack of attention or availability of equipment or anything like that – it’s just this normally takes a very long time.
‘So the answer [to whether 30m doses will be ready by September] is no.’
Ms Bingham said if she puts on ‘rose-tinted specs’, she would hope to see positive interim data from both Oxford and Pfizer BioNtech – another promising vaccine candidate – on their jabs in early December.
‘And if we get that then I think we’ve got a possibility of deploying by year-end,’ she said. Though only a couple of million Britons – likely the very elderly – will have access.
In another blow to vaccine hopes, Ms Bingham said she only has 50 per cent confidence that a vaccine will be available to every vulnerable group in the UK by Easter.
Professor Andrew Pollard, who is the head of Oxford’s vaccine trial team, agreed that he was optimistic that the data on safety and efficacy of his jab will be available by the end of the year.
But he said there was only a ‘small chance’ of a vaccine being made available by Christmas.
Asked if the jab could be deployed before Christmas, Professor Pollard said: ‘I think it’s very difficult to answer the question because first of all we have to do the analyses to find out whether they work, and if they do, then there are steps that have to be gone through and the timelines for those are not exactly clear to me at the moment.
‘I think there is a small chance of that being possible but I just don’t know.’
It normally takes years for vaccines to be green-lit by the UK’s drugs watchdog, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), and a similar body in the EU. Regulators must pore over data to make sure jabs will be safe and effective to dish out to millions of people.
Boris Johnson said over summer that British life won’t return to normal until summer next year when a vaccine comes to the rescue.
But, tempering vaccine expectations further, Professor Pollard told the Commons committee the first wave of jabs were unlikely to be good enough for leaders to drop all social distancing rules.
He said that a vaccine that is at least 50 per cent effective could ‘halve the number of deaths or hospitalisations here in the UK’ which would be ‘a dramatic change from where we are today’
‘But, unfortunately, it does not mean that we can all get back to normal immediately because it takes time to roll out vaccines, not everyone will take them, and we will still have people getting this virus.’
Meanwhile, Professor Robin Shattock, who is leading Imperial College London’s Covid-19 vaccine effort, added that the world would be living with the consequences of coronavirus ‘for many years to come’.
He said: ‘I think it is unrealistic to expect that the UK Government or the country will wake up and hear there is a vaccine that is successful and life gets back to normal immediately.
‘We are likely to be living with the consequences of this virus for many years to come – even though vaccines will make life that much much better and reduce, hopefully, fatalities and serious illness significantly.’