The World Health Organization says it should soon see interim results from clinical studies of possible treatments for COVID-19, involving close to 5,500 recruits in 39 countries.
Mike Ryan, head of the WHO's emergencies program, said it would be unwise to predict when a vaccine could be ready against COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus that has killed more than half a million people.
There is currently no proven vaccine against the disease, but 18 potential candidates are being tested on humans.Meanwhile, WHO officials defended their response to the virus that emerged in China last year, saying they had been driven by the science as it developed. "I regret that there wasn't fair, accessible access to COVID tools. I regret that some countries had more than others, and I regret that front-line workers died because of [that]," he said.
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