TV VOICE OVERS: Our great hope - a vaccine for coronavirus ...
This is a whole new kind of vaccine ...
Virus scientists have been working frantically to try to stop the deadly illness in its tracks ...
A team of Australians is trying to develop a vaccine for the virus ...
The only thing that will really allow life as we once knew it to resume is a vaccine ...
REPORTER: Scientists around the world have
joined an unprecedented global effort to create
a Covid-19 vaccine.
There's no race between those of us designing
vaccines.
The race is on for all of us against the virus.
We've never seen this level of collaboration,
cooperation.
We've seen unusual bedfellows - the private
sector, the public sector, science, medicine,
everyone coming together.
But there is no guarantee of success and the
challenges both scientific and ethical are
enormous.
People need to appreciate that trying to develop
a, a vaccine in the face of a pandemic, is
a bit like trying to do a Houdini trick where
someone puts a bag over your head so you can't
see.
We need a systemic approach that actually
means fair and equitable pricing at the end
of the day on what should be a public good.
It's very easy to criticise big pharma, but
to be quite blunt until someone comes up with
an alternative, we have to go with what we've got.
Tonight, on Four Corners the race for a remedy
with more than 100 in development, we investigate
the efforts to create a COVID-19 vaccine and
the battle to ensure that if scientists are
successful, the vaccine doesn't just go to
the highest bidder.
These days, the lights are always on in the
molecular bioscience labs at the University
of Queensland.
Professor Paul Young is one of the leaders
of the UQ team.
He and his colleagues have spent nearly every
waking moment since January working on their
Covid-19 vaccine.
It's been 24/7 essentially with everybody
in the team working very hard to get to where
we are currently, as quickly as we can.
So, lots of weekends, in fact, all weekends
and most evenings.
There's been a lot of time spent together.
I think we probably know each other better
now than we, we ever have done.
What has amazed me, even with the 24/7 load
that the whole team is carrying, we're still
buoyed, we're still excited, the programme
is still going forward with full enthusiasm
from everybody.
UQ's vaccine project is seen as the most advanced
in Australia and the team is feeling the weight
of responsibility to deliver.
The pressure has been enormous.
In normal vaccine development, you know, you
would have months to work some of these issues
out. We've got days and weeks to do that,
instead.
The pressure certainly has felt the need for
us to ensure that our vaccine does make it
through, into, clinical use, is one that we
feel almost every day.
The UQ project is largely funded by the Coalition
for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations or CEPI...a
group co-founded by billionaire philanthropist
Bill Gates.
If anything kills more than 10 million people
in the next few decades its most likely to
be a highly infectious virus.
In 2015, after the deadly Ebola outbreak in
West Africa, Gates warned that a global pandemic
was looming - calling for an urgent overhaul
of infectious disease research and vaccine
development.
CEPI was formally launched at the 2017 World
Economic Forum, with nearly half a billion
dollars of investment.
Everyone has really taken a leap of faith
to pull this together...
Australian has contributed 14 million dollars.
CEPI was created based on concerns that people
had about the global response to the Ebola
outbreak in West Africa, which I'm sure most
people remember and we didn't have vaccines
that were ready to go at a time of great crisis
and many lives were lost as a consequence.
So, a group of global health experts, together
with some people from the business community,
got together to say, well, how can we prevent
that kind of thing happening again?
CEPI is chaired by Australian Jane Halton,
a former Secretary of the Department of Health.
When she was appointed 3 years ago, one of
her priorities was a project called 'disease
x' - preparing for the next pandemic.
What CEPI did was look around the world, thinking
about this challenge of disease X, to see
who the best partners would be.
One of the 'disease x' projects CEPI funded
was at the University of Queensland, where
researchers were working on new technology
which could be used in a pandemic.
We signed up as a university, and certainly,
a group working on this particular, pathogen
issue, the whole idea of developing vaccines,
disease X, and, and, being ready to deploy
our particular technology for an emerging
threat.
With 14 million dollars from CEPI, the work
was well underway when the first reports of
a viral outbreak started coming out of Wuhan
in China.
The agreement with CEPI provided funding for
us to expand our research team.
So, we, we essentially doubled, maybe even
tripled the, uh, size of the team so that
we could move rapidly towards the development
of the vaccine.
So, there are a number of candidates that
we're funding as part of our work in relation
to COVID-19 that actually haven't yet generated
a vaccine for use in humans.
But it is cutting edge science and so we have
to go carefully because we don't want anything
that puts people at risk.
The virus that causes Covid-19 is covered
in distinctive spike proteins that it uses
to infect cells.
UQ's vaccine uses a genetically engineered
protein, like the spike from Covid-19, which
the body recognises as an intruder and starts
fighting.
What makes it unique is the team's ground-breaking
invention called a 'molecular clamp' - which
helps the spike hold its shape to more effectively
mimic the structure of the virus surface.
Our clamp is sort of like a bulldog clip that
holds that together and ensures that the right
protein in the right structure is presented
to the immune system as a vaccine.
It's a concept that's been around for a little
bit, but the way that they've done it is a
world first.
Tests on mice have shown increased antibodies
in those given the vaccine.
So, the immunity generated by the UQ candidate
in mice in the first test was astounding.
So, in mice it's doing what we want, it's
making the right kind of antibodies and it
was a great joy, brought a smile to a lot
of people's faces, I think.
While the results in mice are promising - this
technology has never been used in humans.
Only about 6 percent of vaccines that make
it to clinical trials turn into commercial
products.
It may be a problem for the University of
Queensland vaccine because it's a protein
vaccine and not a live virus.
We might end up with a vaccine, which gives
us really good antibody responses, which is
what we'd like to see.
But in the long run, the antibody doesn't
last and in a year's time there's no antibody
there and we become vulnerable to the virus
again, or we might be partially protected,
but still able to spread the virus.
This is the CSIRO high-tech biosecurity lab
in Geelong, one of the few facilities globally
that can do advanced animal trials with dangerous
pathogens.
It's playing a critical role in worldwide
hunt to find a Covid-19 vaccine.
Our facility is really very rare in the world.
There's only about half a dozen facilities
of our type.
Dr Trevor Drew is the director of the lab.
Our people dress up in a full suit, with its
own separate air supply,
they come out of the laboratory and go through
a chemical shower in their suits.
This is probably the highest level of containment
that exists anywhere in the world.
Two international Covid vaccine teams funded
by CEPI are relying on the facility to carry
out animal testing.
The Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness
has been working on two different vaccines,
one from Inovio in the United States and another
one from Oxford University in the UK.
The Oxford University vaccine uses a harmless
virus usually found in chimpanzees to carry
the genetic code for the spike protein into
the body, to try and stimulate an immune response.
This particular type of vaccine has never
been licenced for widespread commercial human
use.
Look, my attitude is we should use everything
at our disposal now to try and find a way
out of the crisis that the globe is currently
facing and if that's new science, which we
are trying out, that's fine.
What we have to do is to make sure that we
test things properly, that we make sure they're
safe and we make sure they are effective.
The CSIRO lab uses ferrets in its animal testing,
because they have similar respiratory systems
to humans.
Dr Drew's team injected the ferrets with the
Oxford vaccine...
But before all the animal testing was complete,
Oxford announced it was starting phase one
human trials.
When Oxford announced that they were starting
their phase one trials and we're thinking
"we've only just immunised our ferrets," I'm
going, "Wow!"
They know that both the ferrets and the monkeys
had no adverse effects from the vaccine.
So that's one step to move to humans.
But I must say that is certainly, again, this
is new country, a new territory and there
must have been a very strong case to allow
that one through.
Now, I wasn't a party to any of those discussions,
but you can probably gather, I'm actually
nervous about this but I'm also have a lot
of faith in the checks and balances and the
systems that we actually use.
My personal reaction to the news that the
Oxford University vaccine had moved to phase
one clinical trials was actually one of huge
respect and admiration for the volunteers
who have stepped forward and said, "Yes, we
understand the risks but we're prepared to
do this for humanity."
It is just awesome.
People who are prepared to put their lives
on the line for the furtherment of science
and the development of this vaccine.
The first phase 1 human trial In Australia
of a potential vaccine began two weeks ago.
At this Melbourne clinic these volunteers
were injected with a vaccine made by American
company Novavax.
It had already finished animal trials in the
US.
So phase one trial is really about confirming
the safety in humans and then what we do is
progress to a phase two trial once that safety
data stacks up and is independently reviewed,
and we're completely happy that it's safe
and the, the phase two trial is still a little
bit about safety but starting to get more
readouts on efficacy.
Normally, a phase 1 trial would take several
months but preparations for Novavax's phase
2 stage are already underway.
If we get the, the safety signals that we
need so that the vaccine is definitely safe,
the phase two will start really quickly.
So essentially around the six-week mark, the,
the green light will, will be there for the
phase two and that'll start, um, as well.
So, this is where being able to do things
in parallel, as we've already talked about,
cutting down the unnecessary time in the development
process is our objective.
It is not our objective to cut corners on
safety.
China is at the forefront of human trials
with five teams from biotechs and state institutions
testing their vaccines.
CanSino Biologics, which has a similar vaccine
to Oxford, announced promising results after
successfully testing it on 108 volunteers.
China doesn't have the best of reputation
for making, uh, pharmaceutical products, that's
something, I think that the Chinese government
is very much aware of, they had a big scandal
with vaccines a couple of years ago, where
they were making vaccines, which were not
what they were supposed to be and weren't
working.
So that I would imagine that given China's
current sensitivity about its role in the
spread of the coronavirus, they're going to
be very careful about making sure that any
product that they produce is tested rigorously
to make sure that it's safe.
Now I have great confidence in the global
regulators.
They, more than anybody else, know the consequences
of allowing a product for broad use if it
is not safe.
They have seen those cases, they remember
them very, very well, and I am absolutely
confident they do not want to see that happen.
In America, some members of Congress are calling
for a truly radical approach...so-called challenge
trials in humans, in which volunteers would
be given a potential vaccine and then deliberately
infected with Covid-19 to see if it works.
That is really going down a path where not
many people have gone before.
I think that purposely challenging people
is going to be quite a difficult thing to
accept ethically.
The deadly outbreak in 2003 of SARS - another
type of coronavirus, should have been the
world's wake up call.
With fears of a pandemic, scientists were
tasked to come up with a vaccine.
Adelaide's Flinders University was part of
the global effort.
It was difficult because we hadn't worked
with coronaviruses before.
We didn't really know, you know, can we make
a vaccines against a coronavirus?
You know, what part of the virus should we
be targeting?
So, we were flying blind.
Professor Nikolai Petrovsky's SARS vaccine
work was funded by the National Institutes
of Health in the United States.
The research showed how unpredictable and
slow vaccine development can be.
There were some surprises and the particular
one that really set us back was that the initial
vaccines that were developed were actually
causing the virus to become actually more
lethal and, and making, the animals at least,
get sicker than the animals that had never
received the vaccine.
I mean that's the worst possible outcome.
Ultimately, we were able to show that, yes,
we could fix that problem with our technology
and obviously it took a few years to get to
that point.
SARS died out and in 2011 the US Health department
reallocated its funding to other areas.
We were floored, I mean because, you know,
a lot had been invested in SARS vaccine development
to that date, not just in our program but
in all the programs.
It would be in the hundreds of millions, if
not billions.
If we had continued to chase a SARS or MERS
vaccine, we would be in a better position,
there's no doubt.
We could have done lots more work, yes.
Looking back, we did warn everyone, that we
still believed coronaviruses were going to
cause another big pandemic.
Since the COVID 19 pandemic, the US National
Institutes of Health has come back to Professor
Petrovsky with new funding - and he has now
restarted where he was 10 years ago.
It's a sad reality that funding for preparedness
in these areas runs on the cycle that we describe
as being one of panic and then neglect.
So that cycle of panic and neglect is something
which those of us in the sector have watched
now time and time again and it is sadly the
case that many projects that had promise were
defunded because priorities moved elsewhere.
Leading scientists say failure to adequately
fund infectious disease research has impacted
Australia's ability to respond to a pandemic.
Eight positions in biosecurity research at
the Geelong lab were lost in 2014 after the
Abbott government cut $111 million from the
CIRSO's budget.
The lab's team was gradually rebuilt and two
months ago the federal government announced
a $220 million upgrade of the facility ... but
construction work won't start for 2 years.
In around 2014, there were some significant
cuts to CSIRO, which impacted on the research
capability of ACDP.
The facility, ACDP, is now 35 years old.
It had a projected lifespan of a hundred years,
but of course it's a bit like a broom that's
lasted for that length of time with five new
handles and three new heads.
It's something that we need to constantly
do, is to replace and repair
elements of the facility.
The teams at Flinders and UQ say they were
forced to conduct their animal testing overseas,
because the CSIRO's lab was so in demand.
Unfortunately, they went ahead with two vaccines
from overseas that essentially
used up the capacity.
So, we had to pivot quite quickly, and look
for an alternative source of animal testing.
Funding cuts and the reorganisation of funding
has been very challenging for us, basically
scientists in this area; vaccine manufacturer
and virology in particular, were very dispirited,
very disheartened.
We've seen our teams dissolve, disperse, expertise
go overseas because the funding just wasn't
able to sustain the work or a salary for any
of those people.
So yeah, I think we've lost a lot of capability
over the last couple of years.
As researchers, we always spend a disproportion
amount of our time simply trying to raise
the necessary funds to do our work.
One of the good things that's come out of
this pandemic for those of us working in this
area is that we have been able to receive
funds and I guess we only wish that some of
these funds had been available earlier.
So, to my mind, being able to see a regular
level of funding, being committed to preparedness,
is the priority and if we can come out of
this experience with a greater focus on that
need, I think we'll be all the better for
it.
Since the pandemic, UQ's vaccine team has
received 15 million dollars from state and
federal governments and last week, Canberra
announced a further 13.6 million dollars for
COVID-19 vaccine development in Australia.
Research in Australia is horribly underfunded.
So, there's absolutely no doubt we don't fund
basic research enough.
It's out of that basic research that we are
able to develop the strategies
to combat these large pandemics.
One of the concerns I have, and I fear it's
almost inevitable, as soon as this pandemic
is over, as soon as the attention goes away
from it, we'll go back to the way we were
in terms of funding and so, we will end up
in having a research base that again is not
as well suited to respond as it perhaps could do.
The development of new medical products around
the world is led by private industry, with
just a handful of major pharmaceutical companies
dominating the market.
For companies' vaccines are not an attractive
proposition, they, they  cost a lot to develop,
they're risky, they require significant clinical
trials.
So, for a lot of companies it's not worth
the effort.
There are many pathogens that are potentially
quite risky for human populations, but sadly,
because there isn't a market for any vaccines
or therapeutics in respect of those pathogens,
obviously there's limited amounts of work
done on them.
The pharmaceutical industry has a long tradition
of putting profits over people.
Some examples of that, for instance, are they
won't produce medicines for neglected
tropical diseases because simply the people
who are affected by those diseases aren't
wealthy enough to pay the price that they
would be demanding for those drugs.
The consequences of leaving it up to the market
were demonstrated in the Ebola outbreak in
2014 in West Africa.
A potential vaccine had proven effective in
animals almost a decade earlier, but no company
had been willing to invest in its development.
So, when the Ebola outbreak occurred, nothing
was ready.
There were no doses available, there was no
knowledge as to whether or not the vaccine
was safe or effective.
Now, eventually the vaccine was developed,
it was tested and it did have a role to play
in the initial outbreak, but many healthcare
workers, frontline workers and people living
in West Africa lost their lives, when it turns
out that the vaccine could have played an
important role in, in tamping down the outbreak
at a very early stage.
Our current system is very much industry focused,
patent protection on everything, return on
investment and long development times that
have to be paid for.
Professor Ian Frazer is behind one of Australia's
most famous vaccine success stories...
In 1991 he and his colleague discovered the
technology behind the HPV vaccine that prevents
90 percent of cervical cancer.
All Australian teenagers are now offered the vaccine.
Eventually not in my lifetime, but some time
in my children's lifetime, I think we will
be able to see that we've eradicated cervical
cancer.
The intellectual property on Frazer's breakthrough
was licensed to pharmaceutical
companies CSL and then Merck.
It went on to become one of the world's most
expensive vaccines
earning Merck billions of dollars.
The vaccine has only recently become more
accessible in developing countries - which
is predicted to save millions of lives.
This vaccine has been incredibly profitable
to the companies that have sold it.
But also, then, incredibly difficult for people
to access.
Cervical cancer is one of the leading
causes of death for women in developing
countries.
I think approximately 270 thousand women die
each year and so the unaffordability and the
lack of availability of this vaccine, whether
due to high prices or insufficient manufacturing
capacity, it leads this direct consequence
of large numbers of women, sort of continuing
to be vulnerable to developing HPV and eventually
to cervical cancer.
Look, I, I have to be honest and say that
I realised that  big pharma doesn't exist
for any purpose other than to make money for
its shareholders and if we didn't have big
pharma, we wouldn't have a papillomavirus
vaccine.
It's very easy to criticise big pharma, but
to be quite blunt until someone comes up with
an alternative, we have to go with what we've
got.
I think that, what we've learned from that
is that if we're developing a vaccine, which
is going to be a public health measure across
the planet, we have to think at the start
about how we're going to actually make that
possible.
When it comes to big production of billions
of doses, that is not something that you do
in a university lab.
So, this is why we need this partnership between
research and really experienced manufacturers.
I'm really pleased that the big multinationals
have already indicated that they will partner
with us to work together in a way that is
unprecedented, and that they will actually
produce vaccine at the cost of goods of what
it actually costs to produce.
Every vaccine team funded by CEPI has to commit
to making their technology available in a
fair and equitable manner - but CEPI won't
confirm if Covid-19 vaccines will be patented
and who will own them.
We have what we call our Equitable Access
Policy.
All of the people who we work with have signed
on to our equitable access policy.
They understand that is the basis on which
we provided funding.
But we're not usually the sole funder, so
there is a negotiation to be gone through.
What I can tell you is the crucial thing here
is that vaccines are made widely available,
that they're made available to people who
need them first and most, and that they're
made available at a price that is affordable.
The devil is in the details.
What does the agreement actually say about
equitable access, about pricing for drugs,
about making sure that they're distributed
on need, not by distributing to the country
that has the most power in the room or who
has the most incentive to keep the pharmaceutical
industry happy.
No amount of philanthropy or altruism is going
to solve this problem.
We need a systemic approach that actually
means fair and equitable pricing at the end
of the day on what should be a public good.
One of the world's largest pharmaceutical
companies is GlaxoSmithKline or GSK.
Last year they made a profit of nearly 13
billion dollars and they are currently working
on their own Covid-19 vaccine.
GSK has publicly declared that of all the
collaborations we have with partners around
COVID vaccines that we don't intend to make
profit during the pandemic phase.
GSK says once the initial pandemic is over,
it sees a COVID-19 vaccine
as a commercial product.
Yes, companies will make money from this.
That's why they're in existence and I suppose
in one sense the coronavirus vaccine will
be a blockbuster.
The university is not going to take any royalties,
or licence fee for the, for the, intellectual
property that's bound up in the molecular
clamp for this particular vaccine.
And so, we're definitely committed
to that equitable access.
There is a potential for this to be a commercial
product after this
initial wave of a pandemic.
It's certainly our technology is a platform
technology, so it can be applied to a large
number of viruses.
Medicins San Frontieres is on the frontline
of the Covid response.
It's calling on companies and institutions
not to patent any vaccines or treatments.
They need to come to the table and give us
access to their science, to their production,
to their formulations for the vaccines that
they're producing, for the treatments that
they're producing so that they can then be
mass produced at the scale that we need and
at the price point that we need.
The United States has been largely absent
from international efforts to coordinate the
development of a Covid-19 vaccine - pouring
billions into its own program
called 'Operation Warp Speed.'
Operation Warp Speed is a new programme by
the United States government, which is seeking
to sort of accelerate the development of a
new vaccine as quickly as possible.
So, you really get the sort of rupture between
what the United States does, which has, you
know, the most capital, the most resources,
the most science, and really what the rest
of the world is trying to do collectively
and, and that eventually is going to come
to a real flashpoint.
Any vaccine that's manufactured by the large
pharma companies in the United States, I do
not see how a single dose of vaccine will
be exported or be allowed to be exported until
that whole domestic market is satisfied, which
may take two or three years.
There's nothing to stop a country banning
the export of a product manufactured in that
country, so that's their, their right.
What we don't want to see is a level of vaccine
nationalism, where countries basically are
not prepared to contribute to the global effort.
The best thing we can do at the moment is
advocate for that, to advocate that actually
if there's any of this disease anywhere in
the world, it's in nobody's interest.
In 2009, during the swine flu pandemic, Australia's
CSL Limited was one of the first
to invent a vaccine.
A prior agreement with the federal government,
required CSL to first supply Australia with
enough vaccine to protect its population,
before selling it to anyone else.
What it really points to is we have to have
binding, fair agreements that all countries
can rely upon.
If that doesn't occur, every government will
behave in the exact same way that Australia
did at that time, because at the end of the
day, governments will look out for the needs
of their own citizens first knowing that every
other government might act in the exact same
way if they happened to have a vaccine.
We worry about export control.
We know that export controls have occurred
in areas where there is high demand.
I think we would be naive if we didn't expect
that there is a risk that that might happen
in relation to vaccine.
So, we need to take steps and we're taking
those steps to ensure that production is globally
diversified and that is our objective.
CSL has committed to manufacturing UQ's vaccine
if it's successful. But Australia's capacity
to produce other types of potential COVID-19
vaccines is limited.
So fortunately for the University of Queensland
vaccine, it's a fairly generic platform, so
the kind of facilities that CSL produced would
work for that, a protein subunit vaccine.
If it turns out that it's a DNA or particularly
an RNA vaccine, we might be really struggling
to manufacture that at the level needed.
In 2017, a Defence Department report warned
that Australia's vaccine manufacturing capacity
was "low" and the capability to upscale production
was "a major weakness."
The recent report suggesting that we need
more vaccine development infrastructure, I
can only agree with.
I think that we have to accept that for most
of our vaccines at the moment with the exception
of the flu vaccine come from overseas and
that puts us in a very vulnerable position
when borders are closed.
We actually should be investing now in greater
vaccine manufacturing capacity around the world.
I think that idea has significant merit.
We know that at times, we need more vaccine
to be produced than we might need on a regular basis.
While work on a new vaccine continues, scientists
are testing to see if anything that's already
on the shelf could help.
One very old vaccine is now being trialled
in the new fight against Covid-19.
The BCG vaccine is nearly 100 years old and
it is a vaccine that was created to protect
against tuberculosis or TB.
The BCG vaccine doesn't just prevent tuberculosis
- Professor Nigel Curtis has spent much of
the past decade studying the impact it has
on our immune systems.
The really extraordinary and exciting thing
about this vaccine is that it also enhances
the immune system in a very generalised way.
In studies in Guinea-Bissau, a country with
very high mortality in babies and in children,
it was observed that those who'd had the BCG
vaccine had a much better survival and the
increased survival was not due to reduced
deaths from tuberculosis, but reduction in
deaths from the other infections that kill
young children in high mortality settings,
such as pneumonia and sepsis, and diarrhoea.
The World Health Organisation is now backing
a trial to see if the BCG vaccine could help
protect healthcare workers against Covid-19.
A study of this size would generally take
up to a year to plan and set up but we managed
to get this trial going in 20 days from first
meeting to design the trial to recruiting
our first participant.
We're hoping that by using this property of
the vaccine, we can enhance the immune system
of healthcare workers so that when they're
exposed to the coronavirus,
they get a less severe disease.
The trial involves 10 thousand health care
workers in Australia, Spain and the Netherlands.
It hasn't received any federal government
funding, but the Gates Foundation has donated
10 million dollars.
Until we've had a chance to look at this properly,
it's way too early to conclude that BCG vaccine
provides any protection against coronavirus.
it's very important that we don't lose sight
of these tried and tested methods.
Despite the fact there's an urgency to getting
results that we can use for this pandemic,
unless we do trials and experiments properly, we're in danger of getting the wrong result.
At the University of Queensland, Professor
Paul Young and the team are preparing to take
their vaccine to the next level.
Human trials are due to start in July.
I think Professor Paul Young must be feeling
quite anxious at the moment because of course
he'd, a lot of people are expecting that the
vaccine is going to work
and we don't know yet.
Let me just say, from our perspective, there's
no, there's no race between
those of us designing vaccines.
The race is on, for all of us against the
virus and we'd be happy to see any other vaccine
reach a point where it can make a difference
in the global community.
I suspect that one vaccine is not going to
be enough to vaccinate the entire world, so
we will need a multi-pronged attack on this.
So, the more of us that get to that end point
of being able to deliver at scale
a workable vaccine, the better.
Scientists warn that the chance of success
is slim and that the world might have to learn
to live with Covid-19.
I think by nature, most people who are scientists
in research labs around the place are conservative.
So generally, we're not over overstating the
results that are coming through.
We're optimistic and we think that we've got
enough irons in the fire to solve the problem,
but we certainly don't want to give false
hope.
I do think it's important to remind ourselves
when it comes to the optimism that many of
us feel that there's never been a vaccine
produced for a coronavirus.
We still don't have a vaccine for HIV.
Even though we've now got treatments, which
is fantastic,
we don't have a vaccine for HIV.
So, it is worth remembering that there are
areas where people have invested billions
of dollars to try and find an answer and to
date that they have not.
