U.S. provides $1 billion in funding for Oxford vaccine

AstraZeneca has received more than $1 billion from the U.S. Health Department’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to develop a coronavirus vaccine from the University of Oxford.

The British-Swedish drugmaker has agreed to initially supply at least 400 million doses of the vaccine and secured total manufacturing capacity to produce 1 billion doses, with first deliveries in September.

AstraZeneca’s development program of the vaccine includes a phase three clinical trial with 30,000 participants and a pediatric trial.

Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca, said the drugmaker would do everything in its power to make the vaccine “quickly and widely available.”