Project leader: Oxford’s COVID-19 vaccine trial has 50 per cent chance of success

The University of Oxford’s COVID-19 vaccine trial has only a 50 per cent 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 per cent chance that we get no result at all.”

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.