The United States expects to have at least one safe and effective vaccine for the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) by the end of this year from a batch of trial vaccines it is working on, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told Fox Business on Friday
WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 15th May, 2020) The United States expects to have at least one safe and effective vaccine for the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) by the end of this year from a batch of trial vaccines it is working on, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told Fox business on Friday.
"What we're doing now is we're narrowing those (trial vaccines) down to the core group," Azar said. "We're going to place huge multi-million Dollar bets on and scale massive vaccine domestic production so that by the end of the year we hope we would have one or more safe and effective vaccines and hundreds of millions of doses."
The Trump administration was reported earlier this month to have launched "Operation Warp Speed," an effort to produce hundreds of millions of vaccine doses for COVID-19 by early next year.
Some doctors and scientists outside the Trump administration have disputed the target, saying it would take at least 12-18 months to produce a safe working vaccine.
Azar's remarks suggest Trump wanted to accelerate the program further to a delivery time of eight months.
Azar said drug manufacturers want to do a Phase 1 trial for the vaccine, then wait and do a Phase 2 trial, and wait again to do a Phase 3 trial before they start thinking about commercial-scale manufacturing.
"[T]hat's not acceptable. We've got to use the full power of the US government and the private sector here to compress all of those timelines to reduce inefficiency," Azar said.
Azar's comments came a day after Rick Bright, a top government vaccine expert fired for challenging Trump's response to the COVID-19, told Congress that the administration lacked a structural plan to ensure fair and equitable distribution of treatments or vaccines for the pandemic.
