The United States is preparing on Monday to start a clinical trial of a new vaccine developed to protect against the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the Associated Press reported, citing an unnamed US administration official.
The trial has not been announced publicly but the official reportedly said that that participants will receive an experimental vaccine on Monday at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle.
The experiment is said to be funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary governmental agency responsible for biomedical and public health research in the US.
The trial will reportedly include 45 young healthy volunteers who will be given different doses of the medicine.
According to the news outlet, US public health officials said that would take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine.
The coronavirus pandemic in the US has prompted the Trump administration to take a package of preventive measures, including declaring a state of emergency across the country, closing borders and banning travel to countries with high infection rates.
As of Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) has registered over 9,700 new cases of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outside of mainland China - Ground Zero for the contagious pneumonia-type infection - bringing the total number infected in the global pandemic to over 167,000, with over 6,400 dead.
