Coronavirus vaccine: How close are we and who will get it? – BBC News

The UK Government has signed a deal with pharmaceutical companies GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Sanofi Pasteur for 60 million doses of a potential Covid-19 vaccine.

It’s one of four deals the UK Government has agreed in recent months – each one for a different type of potential vaccine – and a total of 250 million doses.

But it’s still too early to know for sure if any of these vaccines will protect people.

So when will a coronavirus vaccine be ready? Who would get it first?

BBC health correspondent Laura Foster looks at the situation.

Graphics by Terry Saunders, producer Megan Fisher.

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About This Source - BBC News

The video item below is a piece of English language content from BBC News. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster funded by the UK Government, and British license fee payers. Its headquarters are at Broadcasting House in Westminster, London.

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In This Story: COVID-19

Covid-19 is the official WHO name given to the novel coronavirus which broke out in late 2019 and began to spread in the early months of 2020.

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In This Story: GlaxoSmithKline

GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK) is a British multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in Brentford, England.

Established in 2000, by a merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham, GSK was the world’s sixth largest pharmaceutical company according to Forbes as of 2019, after Pfizer, Novartis, Roche, Sanofi, and Merck & Co.

GSK is the tenth largest pharmaceutical company and #296 on the 2019 Fortune 500, ranked behind other pharmaceutical companies including China Resources, Johnson & Johnson, Roche, Sinopharm, Pfizer, Novartis, Bayer, Merck, and Sanofi.

The company has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. As of August 2016, it had a market capitalisation of £81 billion (about US$107 billion), the fourth largest on the London Stock Exchange. It has a secondary listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company developed the first malaria vaccine, RTS,S, which it said in 2014, it would make available for five percent above cost. Legacy products developed at GSK include several listed in the World Health Organization‘s List of Essential Medicines, such as amoxicillin, mercaptopurine, pyrimethamine, and zidovudine.

In 2012, GSK pleaded guilty to promotion of drugs for unapproved uses, failure to report safety data, and kickbacks to physicians in the United States and agreed to pay a US$3 billion (£1.9bn) settlement. It was the largest health-care fraud case to date in that country and the largest settlement by a drug company.

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In This Story: Laura Foster

Laura Foster is Senior Health, Science and Environment Reporter & Video Journalist for BBC News. Having progressed through the BBC for nearly ten years, her most recent role was with BBC Look North in Yorkshire. She has produced and featured in several covid-19 explainer videos for the BBC.

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In This Story: Sanofi

Sanofi S.A. is a French multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in Paris, France, as of 2013 the world’s fifth-largest by prescription sales.

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In This Story: Vaccine

A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease. A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins, or one of its surface proteins.

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