AstraZeneca pushing ahead with millions of Covid-19 jabs from Oxford lab

In the race for a new vaccine against Covid-19, Oxford University’s Jenner Institute has emerged as the front runner among 90 institutions who are developing a vaccine against the virus. The Director of Oxford’s Jenner Institute, prof Adrian Hill told Biznews that the institute was able to move very rapidly into clinical trials because of their experience in developing an Ebola vaccine. Prof Hill also said at the end of March that he was confident that they could do it much faster than the 12 to 18 months that most scientists predicted. This week the institute indicated that they were hoping to get some signal by the middle of June on whether it was working on humans and that they have partnered with pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca for the manufacturing and distribution of the Oxford Covid-19 vaccine, if their vaccine worked. But AstraZeneca has decided to push ahead with the manufacture of the inoculation and will be producing millions of doses of the trial coronavirus vaccine even before the research is complete in a major show of confidence in the Oxford product. In this news clip published with permission from NBC; the Chief Executive Officer of AstraZeneca, Pascal Soriot tells Richard Engel that the vaccine will be made available during the pandemic at cost price. – Linda van Tilburg