A human trial of a vaccine against coronavirus in the US has given a dose to its first participant.
This is the first of a group of 45 healthy volunteers to be given the jab, at the Kaiser Permanente research facility, in Seattle.
Each volunteer will receive an injection over a six-week time frame.
“The first participant received the investigational vaccine today,” the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) said in a statement on Monday.
Experts say it will still take many months to know if this vaccine, or others also in research, will work.
Meanwhile in Europe, several hospitals in Italy, Spain and France are to test the experimental anti-viral drug Remdesivir on hundreds of patients sick with Covid-19.
The drug, made by California-based Gilead, has already been tested on patients in China’s Hubei province, where the virus originated.
These are clinical trials: Remdesivir has been tested previously on animals, but has not yet been approved by health regulators.
