The federal government has scrapped a deal to buy more than 50 million doses of a potential coronavirus vaccine being developed in Australia.
The University of Queensland (UQ) and biotechnology company CSL on Friday morning announced they won’t progress trials of their COVID-19 vaccine candidate into the second and third phases after some participants returned false-positive results for HIV.
The National Security Committee, based on scientific advice, made the decision on Thursday to terminate the deal and remove the vaccine from the Australian government’s plan going forward.
“The COVID-19 pandemic writes its own rules. We don’t get to write those rules for it,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison told reporters on Friday.
“Our vaccine strategy … had identified four vaccines that we believed, based on the scientific advice, had the potential to go through to the end of stage three trials and be available here in Australia.
“At no stage, can I assure you, did we believe that all four of those vaccines would likely get through that process.”
Following the termination of the UQ-CSL deal, Mr Morrison announced the government would purchase additional units of a vaccine being developed by pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca by 20 million doses, plus a further 11 million from developer Novavax.
There are now more than 140 million doses of vaccines earmarked for Australians, Health Minister Greg Hunt said, which is more than enough to cover the entire population.
“That this is one of the highest ratios of vaccine purchases and availability to any population in the world,” Mr Hunt said.
“The agreement with CSL not to proceed was mutual and this is the scientific process working.”
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told ABC News she was “very disappointed” by the UQ trial terminations, but reiterated that there are a number of companies in the process of developing vaccines.
“Of course we’re disappointed and now all eyes are looking at what is happening in the UK with the rollout of their vaccine,” she said.
In a statement to the ASX on Friday, UQ and CSL said there were no safety concerns reported in the 216 participants in the first trial phase.
If the vaccine were rolled out to the wider population, however, it would require significant changes to well-established HIV testing and therefore the decision was made not to proceed with the trials, the statement said.
While it would be possible to re-engineer the vaccine in a bid to remove the possibility of false positives, UQ vaccine co-lead Paul Young said it was not possible within a short time frame.
“Doing so would set back development by another 12 or so months, and while this is a tough decision to take, the urgent need for a vaccine has to be everyone’s priority,” he said.
“What is really encouraging is that the core technology approach we used has passed the major clinical test. It is a safe and well-tolerated vaccine, producing the strong virus-neutralising effect that we were hoping to see.”
The government has previously said it wants to start rolling out a vaccine to the Australian community early in the new year.
Earlier this week, Britain became the first Western country to begin a mass-vaccination program against COVID-19 using a vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.
With AAP.
