“With a tiny modification we could use it for COVID-19. We’d already be in the clinic now.” Scientists around the world have spent the past decade warning a coronavirus could jump from bats into humans and cause a global pandemic. Those warnings were repeatedly ignored, and at least three promising coronavirus vaccine programs had their funding cut off just as they were about to test in humans, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald found. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Professor Petrovsky was given funding by US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2004 to develop a vaccine for the virus SARS, a close cousin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Both are bat coronaviruses, and they share about 79 per cent of their genetic code. Loading Even if a SARS vaccine could not be adapted for SARS-CoV-2, human trials of a coronavirus vaccine would have generated enormous amounts of valuable data for future vaccines. “If these vaccine trials had gone ahead – and they looked good – we would have felt in much better shape now,” said Professor Peter Doherty, an immunologist and Nobel laureate. Professor Petrovsky, who has received about $30 million from the NIH for a range of projects, said he received a commitment from the agency to fund his SARS vaccine all the way through to human trials if it were successful at each stage of testing.

His vaccine proved successful in animals and he needed just $US1.5 million to finish the project. But in 2010 the NIH backflipped and told researchers it would not fund any further SARS vaccine research, with the focus to switch to Ebola and Influenza. “It was brutal. It wasn’t just ‘cut SARS funding’, it was ‘stop funding today’,” he said. “They’d already invested a billion dollars – and what was crazy was not closing that last unanswered gap.” The NIH did not respond to requests for comment.

Professor Petrovsky says he did not apply for Australian funding to finish the research because his previous applications for pandemic vaccine research had been rejected. Loading “We figured it was pointless,” he said. “Essentially [the Australian government] try to pretend we don’t exist.” A Health Department spokesman said the federal government had funded “a number” of Professor Petrovsky's grant applications. In 2019, $167.9 million was spent on 744 grants for infectious diseases research, the spokesman said. Professor Petrovsky is now testing a version of his SARS vaccine with minor tweaks to see if it works against COVID-19.

A second SARS vaccine project, led by Baylor College in the US, received $US6 million from the NIH to manufacture and test a pilot dose of a SARS vaccine. But they could not get the final $US3 to $4 million needed for human trials. “You would have had something in the refrigerator that you knew was safe to give to humans. And you could rapidly take it and start using it,” said Professor Maria Bottazzi, co-director of Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development and a member of the vaccine team at Baylor. Had her work been funded to completion, it would have shaved “definitely at least a year” off the 12 to 18-month timetable commonly quoted to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. The college is now retesting its vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. A third team in Canada led by Rachel Roper, now an associate professor of immunology at East Carolina University, was funded by local government and charities to build a SARS vaccine that was about to begin testing on humans.

But with SARS gone, her funding ran out in 2008. Loading In 2009, in her last publication for the project, Dr Roper warned SARS continued to jump from animals into humans, “suggesting that another pandemic may occur”. Her warning was one of many to fall on deaf ears. Professor Trevor Drew, director of the CSIRO’s Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness, which is currently doing animal testing on two COVID-19 vaccines, said: “We knew the next one was coming, and it was likely to be a coronavirus from a bat. “One thing I can say emphatically is we would have learnt a lot more if we had trialled those vaccines.”