Coronavirus vaccine update: China inches closer; Japan sets June 2021 target

China has said that a coronavirus vaccine could be ready within months -- as early as autumn -- amid the global race to find a vaccine and cure for the deadly virus. One of the country's top respiratory expert Zhong Nanshan has said that a COVID-19 vaccine could be ready for use in emergencies as early as this autumn.

Nanshan's prediction was also voiced by the head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention Gau Fu last month. Fu had said that they are drafting guidelines to determine who would be eligible to receive the vaccine first as well as what would constitute emergency use. "Herd immunity still depends on the development of vaccines. Large-scale vaccination will take one to two years. The new vaccine can be used in an emergency as early as this autumn or the end of the year," said Nanshan, as mentioned in the South China Morning Post.

Also read: Coronavirus vaccine: Sun Pharma starts Phase 2 of trials; PM Modi pledges $15 million to GAVI

Meanwhile, Singapore has said that a coronavirus vaccine would take at least one year to become widely available. Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said that people would have to learn to live with the virus. "It will take at least a year, probably longer, before vaccines become widely available. We will have to learn to live with COVID-19 for the long term, as we have done in the past with other dangerous infectious diseases, like tuberculosis," Lee said.

Brazil, on the other hand, has signed up for clinical trials of the potential coronavirus vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca. The Oxford vaccine is among the first to move to Phase 2. "This is a randomised controlled phase III study to determine the safety, efficacy of the non-replicating ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine. Initial non-clinical studies in animals and phase I clinical studies in humans to evaluate the safety of the vaccine were carried out in England and the results demonstrated that its safety profile was acceptable," said Brazil health regulator Anvisa said.

Also read: Coronavirus vaccine update: AstraZeneca 'on track' to roll out vaccine in September

Japan has said that it expects a corona vaccine to come into use by June 2021. The Japanese government has earmarked $1.34 billion for vaccine production and distribution.

In the US, cancer researchers at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have harnessed tools for the development of a coronavirus vaccine. "In many ways, cancer behaves like a virus, so our team decided to use the tools we developed to identify unique aspects of childhood cancers that can be targeted with immunotherapies and apply those same tools to identify the right protein sequences to target in SARS-CoV-2," said John M. Maris, MD, at CHOP.

Moreover, Serum Institute of India joins forces with AstraZeneca to produce 1 billion doses of the Oxford coronavirus vaccine. India also pledged $15 million to COVID-19 vaccine alliance GAVI at the Global Vaccine Summit hosted by the UK.

Also read: Coronavirus vaccine: US says 2 million doses 'ready to go'; AstraZeneca aims to release vaccine in Sept