Australia will produce 84.8 million doses of the University of Oxford vaccine against the new coronavirus, starting in 2021, under a multimillion-dollar deal, the government announced today.
The $ 1.7 billion (€ 1.04 billion) deal will allow Australian company CSL to manufacture a large portion of the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and the British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, in addition to the vaccines being developed by the University of Queensland, Australia.
The 26 million Australians “will have early access to 3.8 million vaccines from the University of Oxford in January and February 2021,” announced that country’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, in a statement, stressing that vaccines must be safe and meet health requirements before they are distributed to the population.
The development of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine is currently in phase 3, while the University of Queensland has already demonstrated that its vaccine works with animals in pre-clinical trials.
Since the start of the pandemic, Australia has reported about 26,300 cases of covid-19 and more than 760 deaths from the disease, most stemming from an outbreak in Melbourne, Victoria.
The outbreak, which began in late June, appears to be subsiding, with Victoria today registering the lowest infection rate in more than ten weeks, with 41 new cases, in addition to nine deaths.
The covid-19 pandemic has already claimed at least 880,396 deaths and infected more than 26.9 million people in 196 countries and territories, according to a report by the France-Presse news agency (AFP).
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late December in Wuhan, a city in central China.
After Europe succeeded China as the center of the pandemic in February, the American continent is now the one with the most confirmed cases and the most deaths.
