WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 28th October, 2020) Vaccine makers contracted by the US government for the COVID-19 are not cutting corners on safety and are committed to meeting regulators' highest approval, Matthew Hepburn, the head of the program, said as concerns remained a week before the country's elections that the process might be tainted by politics.
"We are not cutting corners on safety," Hepburn, who heads President Donald Trump's "Operation Warp Speed" program on Vaccine Development, told a live-streamed event on Tuesday. "We are not cutting corners on the quality of the manufactured product. Those will be done to the highest standards. And we are not cutting corners in terms of what would be expected from an approval by a regulatory authority like the food and Drug Administration (FDA), which, I think, has the highest standard in the world for medical products."
Operation Warp Speed is a $10.8 billion push by the Trump administration to rapidly move COVID-19 candidate vaccines from concept to communities.
Yet, the program has fallen prey from Day One to suspicion of politics due to what the president's rivals say is overzealousness on his part to rush what might be an ill-prepared vaccine to the market to make up for his widely-criticized response to the pandemic that has infected more than 8.5 million Americans and killed over 225,000 of them.
The FDA took an unusual step last week in opening to the public a routine meeting with an advisory group that is weighing in on approving a vaccine for the COVID-19 as the agency battles public concerns about political pressure from Trump to get a remedy out before the November 3 presidential election. Republican Trump is trailing his Democrat challenger Joe Biden in polls for the election.
Operation Warp Speed's Chief Operating Officer Gustave Perna, a general of the United States Army, acknowledged there were worries about how the outcome of the election would affect the vaccine's group, especially if a new administration would be coming in.
"We've got our heads down here and we are driving the sled," Perna said. "We are going to execute our mission as directed. I see nothing that would cause us to stop doing what we're doing, no matter the results of the election."
Pfizer, one of the US drugmakers working on a COVID-19 vaccine for the Warp Speed program, ruled out on Tuesday the possibility of early results before next Tuesday's election.
