Covid-19 vaccine would have been closer if the UK had prioritised finding a Sars jab, experts claim

A vaccine for coronavirus could have been available by now had Britain prioritised finding a jab to fight the first Sars, experts have claimed.

The UK Vaccine Network, which is chaired by chief medical officer (CMO) Chris Whitty, was formed to identify and prepare for emerging disease threats.

But it did not include Sars coronavirus among its priority diseases – even though it featured on the equivalent World Health Organisation (WHO) list, Research Professional News has discovered.

“The Sars omission does seem a bit strange and certainly a mistake in hindsight,” Ian Jones, a professor of virology at the University of Reading, who is not part of the network, said.

Scientists say it is possible that a general Sars coronavirus vaccine may have been developed from closely related vaccines that may have just required a small change.

Chris Coleman, assistant professor of infection immunology at the University of Nottingham, said that the vaccine for the current Sars coronavirus outbreak may have been further ahead if virologists had been working on the similar virus.

“It is possible that if Sars-1 was included, that we would now have vaccines that also worked against Sars-2,” said Dr Coleman.

The UK Vaccine Network brings together industry, academia and funders and is comprised of more than 30 experts, including Sage participants Proffesor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College and Professor John Edmunds of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

It has focused on supporting the Government “to identify and shortlist targeted investment opportunities for the most promising vaccines and vaccine technologies that will help combat infectious diseases with epidemic potential”.

Its advice has been guiding the investment of £120 million of Government funding from 2016 through to 2021.

But none of the dozens of projects funded though the network with more than £70 million in total listed by the Department of Health and Social Care focused on Sars, a type of coronavirus that is behind the current Covid-19 pandemic.

Professor Lawrence Young, pro-dean for external affairs at Warwick Medical School, who is not part of the network, claims the Sars vaccine development “died away” as Sars-Cov-1 disappeared.

“Sars-CoV-2 has been a wakeup call in both the need for more research in virology and for improved public health systems than can be better prepared to manage outbreaks,” said Prof Young.

The network’s paper published in the journal Vaccine in October 2019 – just a couple of months before the emergence of the pandemic Sars-Cov-2 virus – said Sars was on its “long list but not the final list”

Dr Robert Noad, lecturer in molecular virology at the Royal Veterinary College (RVC), a member of the expert network, said no list of priorities will ever be “perfect”, but said the choices that were made did end up helping with the pandemic.

Dr Noad said they had prioritised another coronavirus, Mers, because it was circulating and resulting in disease in humans at the time, while Sars was not.

This prioritisation led to £1.8m being spent on phase one clinical trials of the chimpanzee adenovirus vaccine platform for Mers, he says, which has now rapidly been adapted for use for Sars-Cov-2 by Oxford University.

“We were well aware of Sars-like viruses as a potential threat,” he said. “But the argument was that if you progress to clinical trials for one coronavirus using a particular vaccine platform you demonstrate its potential for any other emerging coronavirus.”

Dr Noad says that one thing that could have allowed for better preparation would have been focusing on viruses originating from specific animal hosts, for example, targeting funding to all viruses from bats or mosquitoes.

“This would potentially have meant we were better prepared for Ebola, Covid and Zika,” he says. “But can we be sure that the next [epidemic] will be from one of these sources just because the previous ones have been?”

Miles Carroll, deputy director of the National Infections Service at Public Health England, who chaired the expert working group on prioritisation, says the group did also prioritise the so-called ‘Disease X’, which refers to an unknown pathogen. “Disease X represents the unknown, which Sars-2 clearly is,” he says.

But Prof Jones says that while “Disease X as a concept is fine … there has to be something specific if you want to make specific vaccine plans, as the vaccine type will relate to the disease.”

Prof Coleman, added: “Vaccines almost always need something specific about them in order to target the virus in question,” he says. “So, the ‘Disease X’ idea is not necessarily appropriate when you have a list of diseases in mind already.”

But Research Professional News understands that the Government does not treat 'Disease X' as a priority pathogen because it does not yet exist. RP News has approached the Department for Health and Social Care for comment.