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Donald Trump predicts Covid-19 vaccine by year end
President Donald Trump on Sunday said he believes a vaccine for Covid-19 will have been found by the end of the year, further shortening the timeline by weeks of even the most optimistic projections for a time-consuming complex process that experts have insisted can take 12 to 18 months.
President Donald Trump on Sunday said he believes a vaccine for Covid-19 will have been found by the end of the year, further shortening the timeline by weeks of even the most optimistic projections for a time-consuming complex process that experts have insisted can take 12 to 18 months.
“We think we are going to have a vaccine by the end of this year,” the president said t a virtual town-hall hosted by Fox News Sunday evening at the Lincoln Memorial.
He acknowledged straightaway the over-the-top optimism in his assessment. “The doctors would say, ‘Well, you shouldn’t say that’. I’ll say what I think,” he said, adding, “I think we’re going to have a vaccine much sooner than later.”
The president went to name the Johnson & Johnson vaccine candidate, which is slated to start human trials in September. A drug from Moderna went under Phase One trial in Washington state in March and has a long way to go.
The Trump administration has launched an ambitious Manhattan Project-style effort called “Operation Warp Speed” to speed up the hunt for the vaccine in a private-public partnership. It is reported to have narrowed down the search from an estimated 93 to 14, with plans to further pare it down to seven, and then to 3 or four for final clinical trials in January.
Trump’s own top medical advisers have offered January as their most optimistic outlook. “Remember, go back in time, I was saying in January and February that it would be a year to 18 months (to develop a vaccine), so January is a year, so it isn’t that much from what I had originally said,” Anthony Fauci, a top epidemiologist and member of the president’s coronavirus task force told told CBS news last week.
And he prefaced that with aa notable qualifier. .”I think that is doable if things fall in the right place.”
Deborah Birx, coordinator of the task force, has reservedly agreed January is “doable on paper”. She has also said, reflecting the magnitude of the challenge, “We make forward progress in vaccines and then a little step backwards and then forward progress.”
The Trump administration has been eager to get ahead of the epidemic as it faces continued criticism for being slow to respond and the president has sought to project optimism with misleading projections of toll that he has revised upwards several times and by touting untested cures and therapeutics such as the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which his own drug regulators has since cautioned against, citing side-effects.
As the race for a vaccine continues globally, questions have been raised about safety, specially of volunteers participating in these fast-tracked efforts. “No, because they are volunteers. They know what they’re getting into,” the president said when asked if he worried bout it. “They’re in many cases very good people. They want to help the process. Look, a vaccine has never gone like it’s gone now.”
“We’re so far ahead of any vaccine ever in history. These things would take two, four, five, six years,” Trump went on to say.
It may take even longer, and indefinitely. A vaccine fr HIV has remained elusive 40 years since the search began.
