Coronavirus Latest: Tuesday, August 11

Both Inovio and BionNTech announced that they are making headway in their coronavirus vaccine trials, and will be able to meet deadlines toward the end of the year or a the start of 2021. Yahoo Finance’s Anjalee Khemlani breaks down the latest news about the coronavirus on The Final Round.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: All right, let's set our attention now to those developments on the vaccine front, specifically what we got out of Russia earlier today. Anjalee Khemlani joins us now for the latest on that. And Anjalee, I think we're all kind of looking sideways at this news, and it also comes on a day when there is some positive news on what's happening with some major pharma companies working on a vaccine here in the US. But as we understand it right now, with Russia's breakthrough vaccine, I mean, what have you heard? And how should we, I guess, be thinking about this news right now?

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Well, what I've heard from a number of health experts is that Russia's claim that they have, you know, basically registered the first vaccine in the world is just simply untrue, just based on the fact that they don't have enough information to really support that. When it comes to data, no one has seen any of this data. All they have is early stage clinical data and nothing about the effectiveness and the long-term sort of results that you need and that period of time to study the effect of a vaccine on a human and on multiple humans, actually. You know, we have phase three trials with 30,000 participants, and Russia has had nothing close to that, so definitely some skepticism about its effectiveness without any proof that this has gone through sort of the normal regulatory process that you expect when it comes to something of this magnitude.

So definitely some concern there, whether or not it actually ends up working does remain to be seen. Meanwhile, we do have some results in the US, in terms of, you know, Johnson & Johnson talking about being able to scale up. We also have Inovio, which it saw some minor setbacks moving ahead with its clinical trials. We're already seeing phase one results coming out and expecting to advance.

Meanwhile, we know that, you know, we do have some concerns, actually similarly to what we've seen in Russia when you talk about the Trump administration pressuring for that election day deadline, so kind of seeing how that would look. Basically, if any of our front-runners, when it comes to Moderna, Pfizer, Oxford, and AstraZeneca, if any of those front-runners were to right now be approved for their vaccine, it would be sort of a similar level of skepticism and concern about a vaccine approval right now.