Researchers worldwide are working around the clock to find a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic. The Herculean effort means that a fast-tracked vaccine could come to market anywhere from the end of 2020 to the middle of 2021.

To date, just two coronavirus vaccine has been approved. Sputnik V – formerly known as Gam-COVID-Vac and developed by the Gamaleya Research Institute in Moscow – was approved by the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation on 11 August. Experts have raised considerable concern about the vaccine’s safety and efficacy is given it has not yet entered Phase 3 clinical trials. The second vaccine in Russia, EpiVacCorona, has also been granted regulatory approval, also without entering Phase 3 clinical trials.

The pandemic has created an unprecedented public/private partnerships. Operation Warp Speed (OWS) is a collaboration of several US federal government departments including Health and Human Services and its subagencies, Agriculture, Energy and Veterans Affairs and the private sector. OWS has selected three vaccine candidates to fund for Phase 3 trials: Moderna’s mRNA-1273, University of Oxford and AstraZeneca’s AZD1222, and Pfizer and BioNTech’s BNT162.

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