U.S. secures 300 million doses of potential AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine

The United States has secured almost a third of the first one billion doses planned for AstraZeneca’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine by pledging up to $1.2 billion, as world powers scramble for medicines to get their economies back to work.

The vaccine, previously known as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 and now as AZD1222, was developed by the University of Oxford and licensed to AstraZeneca. Immunity to the new coronavirus is uncertain and so the use of vaccines is unclear.

The U.S. deal allows a late-stage, or Phase III, clinical trial of the vaccine with 30,000 people in the United States.