Bill Gates commits $750M to help Oxford vaccinate the world against Covid-19

thenextweb.com

40 pointsjoeyespo6 comments

I didn't expect covid vaccine research to be so ahead. They expect to deliver batches by the end of this year.

> Gates’ millions will support the delivery of 300 million doses of the vaccine, confusingly dubbed AZD1222, with the first shipments expected to begin by the end of 2020.

This one is one of the furthest ahead. Its the UK Oxford's ChAdOx1 vector for SARS-CoV-2. They partnered with AstraZeneca and I guess its now AZD1222. It was very quickly far along because it was under development for years and years and was going through trials for MERS already when SARS2 hit.

So they were almost instantly able to start trials on it with the pandemic. And unlike other vaccines they've been wanting to do, money poured in.

The big problem with the Oxford ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine that I haven't seen discussed much is that it doesn't seem to work very well.

Viral gRNA was detected in nose swabs from all animals and no difference in viral load in nose swabs was found on any days between vaccinated and control animals

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.093195v1

For a less technical write-up: https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/05/16/did...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com