Talk about bad timing.
In 2017, the government at the time came under fire for selling off the vaccine production of the State Serum Institute (SSI) to the Aljomaih Group, a Saudi investment company.
Two years later the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
That prompted the new Mette Frederiksen-led government to look into kickstarting vaccine development in Denmark again, and SSI was given almost 30 million kroner to continue efforts to develop a promising COVID-19 vaccine that would be ready by the start of 2022.
Well, now 2023 is swiftly approaching and there is still no vaccine on the horizon. In fact, it likely won’t be ready until at least 2024.
The vaccine, which is scheduled for human trials in 2024 … and some contend that the vaccine may never arrive.
READ ALSO: SSI develops ‘promising’ COVID-19 vaccine
Extraordinary times
Stinus Lindgreen, Radikale’s spokesperson for health and research issues and one of the politicians who green-lighted funding the vaccine, admitted that perhaps politicians weren’t the best equipped to choose which projects to fund.
“It was an extraordinary situation and so we gave more money to this specific area,” he told DR Nyheder.
“We can generally see that the money we set aside for corona-specific research back then didn’t provide the results we had hoped for in many cases. That’s how it goes when you push things through more rapidly than you ordinarily would.”
According to SSI, the project has been delayed because, among other things, there have been problems related to the producer of the vaccine for human trials.
Furthermore, the project has changed from being a vaccine specifically geared to COVID-19 to developing vaccines that can be used for other illnesses as well.
