Countries rush to make vaccine

Russia and China are working to develop a coronavirus vaccine and Beijing has handed over the genome of the virus to Moscow, a Russian diplomatic mission in China said yesterday.

The announcement came a day after the United States announced its push for a vaccine for the deadly coronavirus that has killed 132 so far. The number of confirmed cases crossed 6,000.

"Russian and Chinese experts have begun developing a vaccine," the Russian consulate in Guangzhou city said in a statement.

It was not clear if Russian and Chinese scientists were working together or separately. The consulate in Guangzhou could not be reached for comment.

Russia, which has not had any confirmed cases of the virus, on Tuesday began screening all Russian tourists returning from China, the national consumer health watchdog said on Wednesday.

"The Chinese side handed over the virus genome to Russia, which has allowed our scientists to rapidly develop express-tests that make it possible to identify the virus in the human body within two hours," the consulate said in the statement.

The US process would take three months to start the first trial, three more months to gather data, before being able to move into its second phase, and is being undertaken by the biotech firm Moderna.

Separately, the chief scientific officer of Johnson & Johnson told AFP that his company was also developing a vaccine. The company has made Ebola vaccine.

Meanwhile, scientists in Australia have become the first to recreate the new coronavirus outside of China in what they have called a "significant breakthrough".

The discovery will be shared with the World Health Organization (WHO) in the hope it may help efforts to diagnose and treat the virus.

The World Health Organization announced later Tuesday that China had agreed to allow a team of international experts into the country to work with their Chinese counterparts.

China was quick to sequence the genome of the 2019 novel Coronavirus and make it public, allowing scientists around the world to develop diagnostic tools and winning praise for its efforts, in contrast to the SARS outbreak.