A United States government official has said a clinical trial to test a coronavirus vaccine is set to begin on March 16.

The anonymous official told the Associated Press that the first human participant will receive an experimental dose to test for potential side effects, but it will not infect them with the Covid-19 virus.

The National Institutes of Health is funding the trial, which is taking place at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle.

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. The goal is purely to check that the vaccines show no worrisome side effects, setting the stage for larger tests.

Dozens of research groups around the world are racing to create a vaccine as Covid-19 cases continue to grow.

Meanwhile, Inovio Pharmaceuticals aims to begin safety tests of its vaccine candidate next month in a few dozen volunteers at the University of Pennsylvania and a testing centre in Kansas City, Missouri, followed by a similar study in China and South Korea.

In China, scientists have been testing a combination of HIV drugs against the new coronavirus, and an experimental drug named remdesivir was in development to fight Ebola.

In the US, the University of Nebraska Medical Center also began testing remdesivir in some Americans who were found to have Covid-19 after being evacuated from a cruise ship in Japan.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.

The worldwide outbreak has sickened over 170, 000 people and left over 6,500 dead.