TOPLINE
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a Wednesday interview that a vaccine for Covid-19 could be ready as early as November, an aggressive timeline that would beat many earlier predictions for when a vaccine might be ready
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, explains ... [+]
KEY FACTS
“We have a good chance—if all the things fall in the right place—that we might have a vaccine that would be deployable by the end of the year, by November-December,” Dr. Fauci said on CNN Wednesday morning.
Fauci explained that the vaccine trials with Niaid are proceeding “at risk,” meaning researchers are taking “the next steps before the results of the previous step,” which can shorten the development process by months.
He also did not rule out the possibility that there may be a second wave of coronavirus: “It could happen, but it is not inevitable.”
Many pharmaceutical companies are racing to produce a vaccine as quickly as possible; Pfizer chief Albert Bourla has challenged his team to a “moon-shot-like goal” of having millions of doses of a vaccine distributed to the public by the end of the year.
The FDA has fast-tracked vaccine trials and the Department of Health and Human Services has already signed contracts ordering $100 million worth of needles and syringes for a “Covid-19 mass vaccination campaign.”
Vaccines usually take much longer than a year to go from development to mass market: the fastest entirely new vaccine developed in the United States took four years—it took 20 months for researchers just to bring a vaccine to clinical trial for the 2002-03 SARS outbreak.
Chief Critics
Former FDA chief Scott Gottlieb also said Wednesday that a widely available vaccine is “probably a 2021 event,” saying on CNBC that “we’ll have to have one more cycle of this virus in the fall, heading into the winter, before we get to a vaccine.”
Similarly, Merck
Key Background
There has been much uncertainty, speculation and disagreement among the scientific community as to when a vaccine will be ready for Covid-19. Last week, a scientific report from Stat News flagged issues around lack of data and methodology to back much of the optimism held for Moderna’s vaccine, purported as the U.S. FDA’s vaccine front-runner. The scientific community has also raised skepticism around the University of Oxford’s vaccine due to their use of press release rather than traditional methods of scientific announcement (via studies and journal articles) to communicate developments around their vaccine.
There are 10 Covid-19 vaccines currently undergoing human trials, according to the World Health Organization, with 114 others in preclinical trials.
Further Reading
Scientists Raise Questions About Moderna Vaccine In Market-Shaking Report (Forbes)
Dr. Scott Gottlieb warns that widespread vaccinations for coronavirus by year-end look unlikely (CNBC)
Draft landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines (World Health Organization)
With big talk and hurled insults, the gloves come off in the race for the coronavirus vaccine (CNN)
