LONDON — The race for a vaccine against the coronavirus intensified on Monday as three competing laboratories released promising results from early trials in humans. Now comes the hard part: proving that any of the vaccines protects against the virus, and establishing how much immunity they provide — and for how long. “What this means is that each of these vaccines is worth taking all the way through to a Phase III study,” said Dr. Peter Jay Hotez, a vaccine researcher at the Baylor College of Medicine. All it means is ‘worth pursuing.’” Phase III trials test how well a drug works. Two of the vaccine developers — the first, a partnership between Oxford University and the British-Swedish drug maker AstraZeneca; the second, the Chinese company CanSino Biologics — published their early results as peer-reviewed studies in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

Source: New York Times July 20, 2020 23:37 UTC