NAIROBI, Oct 30 (Reuters) - Kenya has joined the global
clinical trial of Oxford University's vaccine candidate against
the new coronavirus, the state medical research institute said
on Friday.
The vaccine candidate, known as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, has been
developed jointly with Astrazeneca and is being
evaluated in four countries: Britain, South Africa, Brazil and
now Kenya.
"To ensure that Kenyans can benefit... if it proves to be
successful, it is important to assess its performance among
Kenyan volunteers," the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI)
said in a statement.
KEMRI has already vaccinated the first volunteers after
receiving the receiving the required regulatory and ethical
approvals, it said.
The experiment in Kenya will initially involve 40 frontline
workers in the coastal county of Kilifi.
If that phase ascertains the vaccine's safety, then an
additional 360 volunteers will also be recruited into the
programme.
The East African nation has seen a surge in the weekly
number of infections in the past month, after the government
lifted some restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of the
virus.
It has so far recorded 52,612 confirmed cases of COVID-19
and 964 deaths.
The novel coronavirus has killed more than 1.17 million
people, shuttered swathes of the global economy and turned
normal life upside down for billions of people.
The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is expected to be one of the
first from big pharma to secure regulatory approval, along with
Pfizer and BioNTech's candidate, as the world tries to plot a
path out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
(Reporting by David Lewis; Writing by Elias Biryabarema;
Editing by Duncan Miriri and Hugh Lawson)