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American Pharmaceutical giant, Johnson & Johnson (J&J), announced yesterday that it was starting safe human trials with its COVID-19 vaccine after its study on monkeys showed that its best-performing vaccine candidate offered strong protection in a single dose. A published study in the journal, Nature, stated that during the conduct of the trials, when exposed to the virus, 6 out of 6 animals who were given the experimental vaccine were completely protected from lung disease. Also, 5 out of the 6 animals were protected from infection as measured by the presence of the virus in nasal swaps. The Chief Scientific Officer of J&J, Dr. Paul Stoffels, in a telephone conversation with Reuters said, ‘’ This gives us confidence that we can test a single-shot vaccine in this epidemic and learn whether it has a protective effect in humans.” J&J said that it had started early-stage human trials in the United States and Belgium and would test the experimental vaccin...

Brazil is the country with the second-highest number of infections and deaths in the pandemic, after the United States, and the virus is still spreading quickly. That is bad news in every way but one: it makes the South American country an ideal testing ground for potential vaccines against the virus. The job of guinea pig falls to medical staff who work in facilities treating patients infected by the virus, because they are the most likely to come into contact with it, enabling researchers to run a controlled experiment to see how well it works.  “I want to contribute, and this is my contribution — through science,” said pediatrician Monica Levi, one of 5,000 volunteers in Brazil helping test one of the most promising vaccines so far, developed by Oxford University and pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. Levi, 53, works at the Specialized Clinic for Infectious and Parasitic Diseases and Immunizations (Cedipi) in Sao Paulo, the epicenter of the outbreak in Brazil, whe...