Apart from Russia and the US, which other countries are actually working to develop a coronavirus vaccine?
I’m fairly certain China is.
Too many to mention, really. The NYT has a big long list. Countries with Phase 3 trials going on at the moment seem to be UK/Sweden (that’s the AstraZeneca one), Canada, India and Australia (I have no idea where we’re getting test subjects with sufficient exposure to do a Phase 3 trial, but I presume not here). Probably every first world country that’s big enough has some sort of vaccine research going on, and the rest have purchase agreements
As Aspidistra noted, there is a long list. The following two sites were posted in the Breakthrough Vaccine thread and track the status of vaccine development/trials.
When multiple countries are working on a vaccine at the same time, do they have an international pool of information that they can all share their experiences in? Are they all working together or are they all relatively boxed off in their own projects?
I’m curious because it seemed to me that in the relative beginning of the pandemic, the US media seemed to be reporting more with information from European countries but not Asian ones. But that could have just been my misconception.
Has any country begun vaccinating people yet?
UK is starting vaccinations on Tuesday. Likely hospital workers first, due to the difficulty of transporting the sensitive Pfizer vaccine to care homes (next on the list).
Russia has actually started to vaccinate. According to the NYTimes, 59% of Russians do not trust the government enough to get vaccinated.
Relevant to this thread is another item in today’s Times. Some of the vaccines under development might be cheaper, easier to administer, even more effective than Pfizer’s. But once Pfizer’s (or any other) is approved, a trial will not be able to compare unvaccinated people to people getting the test vaccine. They will be obligated to have a head-to-head comparison with an approved vaccine. But it will be then much harder for enough cases to arise to make the comparison.
Medical ethics require that a new drug be shown superior to the best known treatments. As long as there are known treatments, then the control group can be untreated. But only then. This general principle applied to vaccines results in what I said above. Since trials are already expensive, this is likely, according to the Times, to result in other attempted vaccines to be abandoned.