Oxford's COVID-19 vaccine trial has 50% chance of success

The University of Oxford's COVID-19 vaccine trial has only a 50% chance of success as the coronavirus seems to be fading rapidly in Britain, the professor co-leading the development of the vaccine told the Telegraph newspaper.

Adrian Hill, director of Oxford's Jenner Institute, which has teamed up with drugmaker AstraZeneca Plc to develop the vaccine, said that an upcoming trial, involving 10,000 volunteers, threatened to return "no result" due to low transmission of COVID-19 in the community.

It's a race against the virus disappearing, and against time", Hill told the British newspaper.

"At the moment, there's a 50% chance that we get no result at all."said, Adrian Hill, director of Oxford's Jenner Institute, which has teamed up with drugmaker AstraZeneca Plc to develop the vaccine.

The experimental vaccine, known as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, is one of the front-runners in the global race to provide protection against the new coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hill's team began early-stage human trials of the vaccine in April, making it one of only a handful to have reached that milestone.

The vaccine also moved to the clinical trial stage in record time. Alongside Adrian Hill, the vaccine also being co-designed by Prof. Sarah Gilbert, Prof. Andrew Pollard, Prof. Teresa Lambe, Dr. Sandy Douglas.

The work on the vaccine started in early January a day after scientists decoded the genomes of the virus, which much faster than any other vaccine development program took place in history.