FROZEN SARS VACCINE IN TEXAS READY FOR COVID-19 TRIAL

Researchers who were not given funding to mass produce a vaccine against SARS two years ago are now raring to have their drug tested, days after US President Donald Trump bragged that Washington will have the vaccine ready within the year, drawing sneers from health experts who explained that it takes at least 18 months to develop a vaccine and at most 10 years to find a cure against deadly viral diseases.

In an article written by Mark Johnson for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel  on May 13, 2020, between 23,000 and 230,000 doses for the treatment of SARS are kept in a freezer in a storage facility called Cryogene in Houston, Texas since the vaccine developers never got funding to produce the vaccine.

"We just could not get any money. Not from the government and not from private industry," said Maria Elena Bottazzi, a professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and one of the vaccine's developers, but added they are ready now to find out if the vaccine can be effective against COVID-19.

The three partners in the project are Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, and PATH, a 43-year-old global nonprofit dedicated to improving public health, and they will be working on the protein-based vaccine made using yeast, a similar method to the one employed in the manufacture of hepatitis B vaccines used around the world.