The First Vaccine May Not Be the Best

to expire. More than two trillion dollars in government spending was approved to support hard hit businesses and unemployed people earlier this year. Now leaders face an urgent set of decision about whether to extend history's biggest rescue effort. The Trump administration wants another relief built with a price tag of no more than one trillion dollars before lawmakers leave

for summer recess in early August. The Democrat controlled House already approved additional measures worth three point five trillion dollars, but Republicans, who have a Senate majority, oppose many of them. New York City is ready to enter the fourth and final phase of reopening Monday. Mayor Bill de Blasio said zoos, botanical gardens, and outdoor movie production can resume, but indoor dining,

museums and malls will remain closed. Hospitalizations in the state of New York dropped to a four month low and fewer than one percent of residents tested Thursday where positive for coronavirus. New York was once the epicenter of the U S crisis, and finally, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp's edict forbidding local governments to mandate mask wearing capped a week of turmoil in the state. Although still lagging behind Florida, Texas,

and Arizona, George's COVID nineteen cases are surging. On Thursday, Kemp's administration followed his mask voiding order with a lawsuit seeking to block Atlanta's requirement. It was another example of him hindering local efforts, making him an outlier among southern governors who have rolled back reopenings in the face of surging infection rates. And now for today's main story, an experimental COVID vaccine from Australia joined almost two dozen candidates

in clinical trials this week. Development Wise, it's months behind some of the front runners, but Bloomberg Senior editor Jason Gale explains that speed isn't everything when it comes to fighting the pandemic YEA, the global effort to vaccinate humanity against the coronavirus is a bit like a Formula one race. There are all kinds of teams and various models in the race against the pandemic, but in this case, the

winner might necessarily be the fastest. We need vaccines that are not only safe and effective at protecting against COVID nineteen, we also want ones that provide durable protection, hopefully measured in years, not months. We also want munizations that are affordable and easy to administer, and can be manufactured on a massive scale so that all seven point eight billion of US can be protected. Meeting all of these requirements is a tough task, and speed is only part of

the challenge. You probably already know some of the teams in the COVID vaccine race, added front to Moderner and its partner, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Then there's the University of Oxford and Astra's Etiquette, plus Merk Glaxo Smith Klein and Johnson and Johnson are there, along with Sinovac and can Sino biological speedy contenters from China,

just to name a few. In fact, as of July thirteenth, the World Health Organization counted twenty three candidates and human clinical trials plus one seven in earlier preclinical studies. Time will tell which team and whose scientific approach will prevail. One recent addition to the Clinical Trial League is the University of Queensland. Here in Australia, it's known as u Q. So the University Ofquensland has a has a rich history.

It's where over a hundred years old. It has particularly rich history in medicine, and I guess everybody would know about the cartosail vaccine. This is Professor Paul Young. He's the head of the University of Queensland School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences. Ucue's pioneering research almost thirty years ago led to the human papaloma vaccine that's protected millions of women against cervical cancer. More recently, UQ scientists have broken

ground on another aspect of vaccine science. They call it the molecular clap. The biology is a little complicated in essence, some viruses like the coronavirus, change their appearance after they latch onto a seller trying to infect it enables these pathogens to evade detection by the immune system, and that's not good. So Paul's team fiking out a way of training the immune system to recognize the virus early before it's infected cells. It's something they've been working on for

almost a decade. We applied it to influenza, we applied it to a bowler, to mers, another coronavirus similar to COVID nineteen, mumps, measles, so a wide range of different viruses that we demonstrated that this technology could could work with, and we took a number of those through into animal protection studies and showed they induced a good immune response and and could afford protection to those animals who are

challenged with live virus. One of the good things about the molecular clamp is that it can be tailored to work against a number of different diseases, including ones we don't yet know about. That made it attractive to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations or SEPPI, which gave Paul and his team fifteen million dollars to continue developing the

Molecular Clamp Platform. SEPPI is a foundation set up in two thousand and seventeen with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the governments of Norway and India, and the Welcome Trust. It works to accelerate the development of vaccines against emerging effects as diseases and to make them broadly accessible. The objective of the grant was to develop

three vaccines as demonstrators of our platform. An influenza A, respirators in city or virus one so we could compare our platform with other approaches, but also an emerging disease, which just happened to be MERS. We chose MERS quite fortuitously because obviously as a coronavirus, what we learned with MERS we were able to apply to to COVID when

it came on the scene. In fact, even before they knew that the coronavirus was going to cause a pandemic, they started work on a vaccine against it, in part to see if they could. We didn't know how far

we'd take that process. We just wanted to give out, give ourselves a little bit of a stress test ourselves, I have to say, like many people back in early January, no one anticipated that size Kobe two would spread as far as it did, or as far as it has and still spreading globally and having the impact that it's had. A vaccine candidate was constructed within twenty four hours of

the virus is genetic sequence being published. Over the next three to four weeks, we tested about two hundred and fifty different variants of that and within that four week period we've chosen our lead candidate. But also within that period, in fact, it was only about ten days after we got the sequence, SEPPI got in touch with us to say that they would like to trigger us as one of the groups that they would support in developing a vaccine.

All the way through. Starting last Monday, about one and twenty adult volunteers in Brisbane are participating in an initial study of the vaccine to check that it's safe and induces a sufficiently strong immune response. We're highly confident because we've already gone through genicity studies in mice and shown that our vaccine induces extremely high levels of neutralizing anybody, higher than any I've seen in other corresponding vaccine approaches.

U Q delayed studying human trials until lab studies demonstrating safety and efficacy were completed. In the meantime, it's worked with various research groups and Melbourne based pharmaceutical company CSL to accelerate manufacturing. In fact, CSL began figuring out how to make large amounts of the vaccine material well before the experimental shot had entered initial human studies, just because we need the program to go as rapidly as possible.

This is Dr Andrew Cuthbertson. He's an executive director at CSL, and until a few weeks ago, he was also the company's chief scientist. CSL is one of the world's biggest makers of blood based therapies. It's also the parent company of Securists, which makes flu vaccines. We believe we could make somewhere between fifteen to fifty million doses by the end of this calendar year, and we could make something like a hundred million doses over the next of months. Now.

I think we will have those millions of doses available, but they won't be available for mass vaccination of the community until we've generated the clinical trial data to support a license for the vaccine. In technical terms, the candidate vaccine contains a recombinant protein stabilized into a trimeric form of the spikes on the outside of the sascovy two virus. Plus it has securisies M fifty nine adjuvant that makes flu shots more effective in the elderly. The chemical is

designed to stimulate a better immune response to vaccines. Andrew says it will bolster production of so called helper T cells as well as reduced the amount of vaccine needed and eat shot and therefore we can potentially make more doses, which may be critical. Never have so many scientists work so hard at the same time to produce a vaccine against a completely new virus. The stakes are high and

some of the risks. Being fast is definitely an advantage, but the real winners will be those who produce a safe and effective humanization that can save the most lives from this insidious disease. Lucky for us, we've never had so many teams using so many different approaches racing to beat a single common enemy. That was Jason Gale in Melbourne.

And that's it for our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one bureaus around the world, visit bloomberg dot com, slash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by topor Foreheaz, Jordan Gaspourey, Magnus Hendrickson and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Jason Gale. Original music

by Leo Sidrin. Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesca Levi. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.