COVID-19 continues to be a healthcare focus as we enter autumn with organisations around the world racing towards a COVID-19 vaccine. Vaccine development and testing usually takes much longer, but this month, the University Of Oxford’s vaccine expanded into US Phase III clinical trials with 30,000 volunteers.

In Russia, the Sputnik V vaccine was approved prior to the completion of phases 1 and 2, and before phase 3 had started.

Britain has already signed deals for more than 340 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine that is likely to be provided in the second half of 2021. Some experts are concerned that the vaccines developed and brought to market for COVID-19 will be risky due to condensed testing and unknown long-term effects.

In September, we asked our panel members in the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain: “Would you trust a COVID-19 vaccine made available to the public by 2021?”.