SUSPICIOUS Americans reckon a coronavirus vaccine has been created, but that it's being "withheld from the public", a joint study shows.

Nearly one-third of those surveyed believe a vaccine already exists to prevent the bug, while nearly half maintain the virus was created in a lab.

The Democracy Fund and UCLA Nationscape Project, along with USA Today, quizzed 6,300 Americans from April 2 to 8.

Shockingly, their survey found that nearly 50 per cent of respondents refuse to believe the official death toll, which has already soared to more than 54,000 in the US.

Des Moines Register said the results showed people have a lot of mistrust in health officials and the government during the pandemic.

Twenty-nine per cent said it was either probably or definitely true that a vaccine preventing coronavirus infection exists, but was being withheld from the public.

And 32 per cent of respondents maintained that cures to beat Covid-19 infections exist but are also not being shared with patients.

However, about seven out of ten Americans said those statements were false.

Robert Griffin, research director for the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, said: "To see about a third of people give that some level of, 'Yeah, that might be true,' that was pretty shocking to me.

"That's a pretty dark type of thought to be floating around the public.

"There's an undercurrent of a lack of trust in society, a lack of trust in elites."

Interestingly, the survey found that 44 per cent believed the coronavirus was probably created in a lab.

Griffin told the Register: "The key word there is 'created'. It is a question that points toward intentionality."

Connection to bats

Yet the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday that all available evidence suggests the coronavirus originated in bats in China late last year and it was not manipulated or made in a lab.

US President Donald Trump said last week that his government was trying to determine whether the new bug emanated from a lab in Wuhan, in central China.

WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib told a Geneva news briefing: “All available evidence suggests the virus has an animal origin and is not manipulated or constructed virus in a lab or somewhere else.

“It is probable, likely that the virus is of animal origin.”

Scores of trials

The joint survey findings comes despite reports of more than 80 Covid-19 vaccine trials underway across the world.

Adam Kleczkowski Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, told The Conversation that vaccinating everyone "is neither practical nor feasible".

"Mathematical modelling and data from vaccination programmes suggest that we don’t need to vaccinate everybody," he added.

Scientists believe that, to stop the bug spreading further, and to make it slowly die out, "about 50-to-70 per cent of the population needs to be resistant.

"An even higher proportion is needed if we want the eradication to proceed quicker and to prevent further outbreaks.

"Some people will have developed immunity to the coronavirus.

"But the number of people who have developed antibodies as a result of having had the disease is still far too low to reach herd immunity.

"The remaining protection would need to be achieved with a mass vaccination programme," said the expert.

In the US, Novavax has identified a coronavirus vaccine candidate and is accelerating initiation of its first-in-human trial to mid-May.

Most read in US news

The late-stage biotechnology company, which develops next-generation vaccines for serious infectious diseases, recently announced it has identified a coronavirus vaccine candidate, NVX-CoV2373, using Novavax’s nanoparticle technology.

Matthew Frieman, Associate Professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said there was “strong evidence that the vaccine created by Novavax has the potential to be highly immunogenic in humans".

He said – if the trial is successful – it "could lead to protection from Covid-19 and help to control the spread of this disease.”

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