According to William Haseltine (photo), PhD, former Professor, Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, and Founder of Human Genome Sciences, writing on May 16, 2020 in Forbes Magazine (https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/05/16/did-the-oxford-covid-vaccine-work-in-monkeys-not-really/#b8b476b3c712) “the day after data appeared from the vaccine maker Sinovac Biotech (http://www.sinovac.com/), a Beijing, China-based company, showed complete protection of rhesus macaque monkeys by their vaccine candidate (whole inactivated SARS-CoV-2 virus particles) (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/covid-19-vaccine-protects-monkeys-new-coronavirus-chinese-biotech-reports) (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/05/06/science.abc1932), scientists from the Jenner Institute in Oxford issued a press release (date) announcing that their vaccine (an adenovirus vector based vaccine that carried mRNA for the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein) worked to protect rhesus monkeys and that they were moving forward with large scale human safety trials (https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/investigational-chadox1-ncov-19-vaccine-protects-monkeys-against-covid-19-pneumonia). At the time, the substantiating data was not available. Now it is, in the form of a May 13, 2020 BioRxiv preprint (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.093195v1.full.pdf) “Does the data support the claim?” Dr. Haseltine asked rhetorically in his Forbes report and his answer was “Not really.” He went on to explain, “All of the vaccinated monkeys treated with the Oxford vaccine became infected when challenged, as judged by recovery of virus genomic RNA from nasal secretions.Login Or Register To Read Full Story