Amid Fears Of New Pandemic, Covid Jab Scientists Develop Bubonic Plague Vaccine

Fearing the emergence of a superbug strain of the black death, scientists behind the Oxford/Astra Zeneca Covid jabs are developing a bubonic plague vaccine

The UK currently has no vaccine for the plague, which, throughout history, has killed around 200 million people worldwide.

But now the team behind the Oxford Jab are reporting progress in their work on a vaccine.

The Telegraph reports: Three of the world’s seven known pandemics have been caused by the plague, a bacterial infection triggered by the Yersinia pestis microbe. It can be treated with antibiotics but none of the several vaccines in development are approved for use.

Scientists have called for the UK to add a Black Death jab to its stockpile as the risk of a superbug strain rises.

And now the Oxford team says a trial of its vaccine on 40 healthy adults which started in 2021 has yielded results which show it is safe and able to produce an immune response in people.

The man behind the trial, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, told The Telegraph that the results of the trial are to be submitted to a journal for peer review within weeks, with further clinical trials expected.

He said: “There are no licensed plague vaccines in the UK. Antibiotics are the only treatment. There are some licensed vaccines in Russia.

“The risk in the UK is currently very low. Previous historical pandemics that had high mortality were associated with initiation from fleas on rodents but were driven by person to person spread.”

Government military scientists recently called for a vaccine to be approved and manufactured in bulk quantities because plague still exists in pockets of the world and has “potential for pandemic spread”.

Scientists at Porton Down’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) wrote in a paper in the journal NPJ Vaccines that vaccines need to be expedited “to prevent future disastrous plague outbreaks”.

This, they add, is compounded by the rising issue of antimicrobial resistance which is creating superbug strains of plague that cannot be easily treated by antibiotics.

Plague is spread by fleas which transmit the bacteria from the rodents that carry it to the humans they bite. The Black Death outbreak in the 1300s killed half the population of Europe, according to some estimates.

It can manifest as bubonic plague, pneumonic plague or septicemic plague. Bubonic plague is 30 per cent fatal without treatment and is characterised by swollen and painful lymph nodes around the flea bite.