Promising results for the vaccine being developed here by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca.

Some good news to share today on the vaccine front. Out of the United Kingdom, there were

preliminary results from a Phase 1-2 trial of a candidate developed by the University of Oxford.

In this particular trial, there were over a thousand participants, and the early results

showed that the vaccine is relatively safe and also produces an antibody and T cell response

that may be able to help fight the coronavirus. Also, a Phase 2 vaccine trial out of China showed

promising immune responses, and there is encouraging data coming out of trials conducted in Germany

by Pfizer and Biontech. These are just a few of the 24 COVID-19 vaccines currently in clinical

trials around the world. It's all pretty exciting, and there is legitimate cause for optimism,

but it's still too early to say whether or not these vaccines will offer the kind of protection

we need to beat this virus. And that's why more research trials are underway.

But with all this talk about vaccines, a question I get more than any other is how will the vaccine

actually work and will it be safe? So in this episode, I sat down and talked to one of the nation's

top experts to help explain the science behind all of this. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's Chief

Medical Correspondent, and this is coronavirus, fact versus fiction.

Well, there's still a lot we don't know about this virus infection, and I think people have

noticed that it can sometimes evolve fairly slowly. I spoke with Dr. Barney Graham, the deputy

director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health. He's been at the

center of developing the NIH's current vaccine candidate. Dr. Graham has worked on vaccines

for decades, and he says one big challenge when it comes to fighting these coronaviruses

is that it involves isolating a very particular kind of protein, something called the spike protein.

These kinds of proteins are important for the virus to enter cells. Those proteins sit on top

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