Oxford’s Jenner Institute and the Oxford Vaccine Group are conducting the trial. Adrian Hill, director of Jenner Institute, said last week the “aim is to have about a million doses by September once we have the results of our vaccine efficacy tests,” and “then we’ll move even faster from there, because it’s pretty clear that the world is going to need hundreds of millions of doses ideally by the end of the year to end this pandemic.” The Oxford team is trialing an experimental recombinant viral vector vaccine called “ChAdOx1 nCoV-19,” one of at least 70 vaccine candidates under development worldwide, though only four have been cleared for human testing.

Prof. Sarah Gilbert, who is leading the study, said her team was already working on coronavirus vaccines last year in preparation for an outbreak of “Disease X,” so once the disease hit, they were able to work “unusually quickly.”