Government official: Coronavirus vaccine trial starts Monday Published on March 16, 2020 at 04:42AM by By ZEKE MILLER, Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) — A clinical trial evaluating a vaccine designed to protect against the new coronavirus will begin Monday, according to a government official. The first participant in the trial will receive the experimental vaccine on Monday, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the trial has not been publicly announced yet. The National Institutes of Health is funding the trial, which is taking place at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle, the official said. Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine. Testing will begin with 45 young, healthy volunteers with different doses of shots co-developed by NIH and Moderna Inc. There’s no chance participants could get infected from the shots, because they don’t contain the virus itself.