Coronavirus Vaccine Update: Bill Gates-Funded COVID-19 Vaccine Begins Testing On Humans

Backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a small Pennsylvania-based biotech Inovio Pharmaceuticals have begun injecting healthy volunteers in Philadelphia and Kansas City, Missouri, with an experimental coronavirus vaccine this week. They had passed the regulatory clearance to begin clinical testing.

Forty healthy adults have been chosen as participants in the study of Inovio's vaccine, in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania's medical school and in the Center for Pharmaceutical Research, Kansas City, Missouri. Every volunteer will be administered two doses of the vaccine four weeks apart.

The results of these experimental vaccine testing will be evaluated by biotech expects by late summer and if they are positive, another study will be given the green flag in order to assess the vaccine’s strength against the virus. This will allow them to safely produce a million doses by the end of 2020, which would then be used in additional clinical trials or emergency use if required.

But this is not the only vaccine against the coronavirus outbreak that is in the process of being tested- 6 other vaccines are being funded by billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and his foundation. He is paying for the construction of facilities and the manufacture of six promising coronavirus vaccines, of which after testing, two would be picked up for the final trials.

In his recent interview with host Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, Bill Gates assured that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is doing everything in its power to ensure that the trajectory of COVID-19 is brought down as soon as possible. He revealed that the reason for working on seven vaccine candidates simultaneously is in order to save time, as the novel coronavirus pandemic is not taking any time off as it rapidly spreads throughout the world.

"Even though we'll end up picking at most two of them, we're going to fund factories for all seven just so we don't waste time in serially saying 'ok which vaccine works' and then building the factory," Gates said. "It'll be a few billion dollars we'll waste on manufacturing for the constructs that don't get picked because something else is better. But a few billion in this situation we're in, where there's trillions of dollars...being lost economically, it is worth it.”