COVID-19 Conversations with SHABIR MADHI

A Professor of Vaccinology at the University of the Witwatersrand, co-founder and co-Director of the African Leadership Initiative for Vaccinology Expertise (ALIVE) and Director of the South African Medical Research Council Respiratory and Meningeal Pathogens Research Unit. Professor Madhi is the Research Chair in Vaccine Preventable Diseases of Department of Science and Technology/National Research Foundation and the immediate-past Director of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (2011-2017), and currently serves as the Chair of the National Advisory Group on Immunization in South Africa.

In this COVID-19 Conversation, Professor Shabir Madhi shares the latest update on a the first COVID-19 Vaccine Trial in Africa. The vaccine, developed by the Jenner Institute at Oxford University is called AdOx1 nCov-19. The vaccine has been engineered to produce a type of protein that is found on the surface of the novel coronavirus. Researchers have shown that the antibodies that are produced against this protein after natural infection are able to kill — or neutralise — the virus when tested in labs. This vaccine trial is trying to establish if this will also happen with people who are infected in their normal living environments. The vaccine is being tested on 4 000 people in the UK — by the end of July, that number would have increased to 10 000. Soon, 30 000 people in the United States will participate in a trial and 5 000 people in Brazil have also been enrolled in a clinical trial.