President Donald Trump said Friday that he hopes to have enough doses of a coronavirus vaccine available for all Americans by April. “Hundreds of millions of doses will be available every month, and we hope to have enough vaccines for all Americans in April,” Trump said at a news conference.
He said distribution of a vaccine will begin within 24 hours of its approval by federal health regulators.
“In a short time we will have a safe and effective vaccine and we will defeat the virus,” Trump said.
Earlier, he had said that a vaccine could be approved in October, an ambitious deadline that some experts say is unlikely to be met.
Trump’s schedule for a vaccine matches an optimistic forecast from a senior Health and Human Services official, Paul Mango, earlier this week.
But it is more ambitious than those of pharmaceutical industry executives and other health officials, including Anthony Fauci and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, who have said that most Americans do not they should wait for an opportunity before mid-2021.
“We have a contract to get enough doses, and we have a line of sight right now in clinical trials, so we believe that” the Food and Drug Administration will approve the injections before the end of the year, “Mango said in a interview. The combination of those two will allow us to vaccinate all Americans before the end of the first quarter of 2021. ”
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, was less optimistic than Mango, in Senate testimony given Wednesday.
“If you’re asking me when it will be available to the American public,” Redfield told a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing, “I think we’re probably looking at the end of the second quarter, third quarter of 2021,” which I would suggest at some point late spring or summer next year.
While it is possible to reach a goal by the first quarter of 2021, it is not likely, said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in an interview for the Bloomberg Equality Summit that will take place on September 23. It’s more likely that widespread vaccination will be available later in 2021, he said.
“It would be an aspiration to do that,” Fauci said of the first quarter timeline. “But I think it is more towards the middle or the end of the year that people can be vaccinated. It depends on the vaccine.”
Fauci said he is “reasonably certain” that at least one vaccine will be available in November or December. Large-scale adoption of a vaccine, coupled with the continued – albeit less intense – reliance on social distancing and the use of masks, will allow a return to near normal by the end of 2021, he said.
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