President Donald Trump’s bet that a proven coronavirus vaccine will be the surprise of October to catapult him into a second term faces increasing odds.
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President Donald Trump speaks with his face mask during a press conference in the Brady Press Press Room at the White House on July 21, 2020 in Washington, DC.
But that doesn’t mean you won’t find enough reason to declare victory anyway.
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While the race to find an effective vaccine for Covid-19 has crucial implications for nations around the world, it also has political ramifications in the United States, with Trump hoping to find a vaccine to calm the pandemic and increase unhappiness over his management of the coronavirus response.
Powered by a series of encouraging results from early trials, the administration is laying the groundwork for a high-profile deployment of the initial coronavirus vaccines in just three months. It is the best calendar that also follows the last few weeks before the November 3 elections. Operation White House Warp Speed has invested billions of dollars into developing a vaccine in record time, funding several parallel efforts and buying doses of the experimental injections in a bid that will ultimately pay off.
“We will end with a cure,” Trump said Tuesday. “We are very close to the vaccine, I think we will have some very good results.”
It is a hope that the President has focused amid months of grim news, and one that baffles many researchers across the country, who fear the White House will turn the delicate scientific process into another political hot spot.
There’s practically no chance that the US will have a proven vaccine by Election Day, several vaccine experts told POLITICO. It could also take until 2021 to produce and distribute the hundreds of millions of shots needed to inoculate the entire country.
At the same time, however, the race for drug makers through the first clinical trials means that top vaccine candidates may begin to show signs of their effectiveness in late October, offering Trump the opportunity to take advantage of them as a potential change in the game.
“I think it’s perfectly possible,” said Paul Offit, director of the vaccine education center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, about the chances that the White House would announce a vaccine as a success based solely on its first results. “But I think it would be a mistake.”
Two groups, one led by biotech firm Moderna and the other through a collaboration between Pfizer and German drug maker BioNTech, plan to begin Phase III trials for their potential vaccines by the end of the month, marking the final step for determine if your candidates will be Safe and effective.
A third candidate from the University of Oxford and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, which received more than $ 1 billion from the federal government to preemptively secure 300 million doses, will begin a final trial next month. CanSino Biologics from China is already in Phase III, but the United States does not have any agreements with the company.
It’s a critical stage without a set timeline, as companies look for 30,000 healthy volunteers to participate in each test and then need to reach specific markers to determine how and if it effectively fights the disease. Experts warned that it could take months to complete, with no guarantee that a vaccine will work. According to the Food and Drug Administration guidelines issued in June, a vaccine will have to be at least 50 percent effective to get approved.
But while the Trump administration has insisted it is not going to cut through security, a vote that vaccine developers also took, has left the door open to short-circuit the process before those trials are completed. FDA guidelines indicate that the administration could issue emergency authorizations as soon as it is convinced that a vaccine is safe and effective, authorizing it to distribute it to the public.
In a statement, White House spokesman Judd Deere stressed that any vaccine “must be thoroughly tested to ensure it is safe and effective,” calling it Trump’s highest priority. But he also touted the administration’s engineering of the “fastest test launch,” and did not address a question about whether the White House had any concerns about distributing a vaccine before it is officially approved.
The result could be a major milestone in the pandemic’s trajectory, days before an election that turned into a referendum on Trump’s management of the spiraling crisis. It could also jumpstart the scientific process, undermining public confidence in any eventual vaccine and increasing the risk that the initial round of shots won’t work, or worse, lead to unpredictable side effects.
“That is the concern, not because Trump may raise his survey scores by a couple of percent, but that we could make a catastrophic mistake,” said John Moore, professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College. “Anything in October will be politicized. And the last thing this pandemic needs is more politicization. “
Maintaining a focus on science, not politics, could be especially critical to a coronavirus vaccine, amid a search effort that drew intense public interest and progressed at world record speed. The fastest scientists have developed a new vaccine to date is four years; If successful, a viable coronavirus injection can be found in less than one.
It is a tribute to the unprecedented number of companies and resources dedicated to the subject, vaccine experts said. But they were also concerned that the pace threatened to increase public skepticism about an eventual vaccine, a challenge the administration has already contributed to by spending months promising a breakthrough in winter.
“I think the government was right to do Warp Speed, it just wants to be called differently,” said Offit, warning that the emphasis on producing a vaccine quickly runs the risk of questioning its scientific rationale.
Offit, a member of a National Institutes of Health vaccine group who recently met with Warp Speed officer and Army Lt. Gen. Paul Ostrowski, also described the government as treating Warp Speed as a “weapon secret “and choosing to protect much of its activities from the public
Others emphasized that the first round of coronavirus vaccines may not even end up being the most effective, leaving the United States far from the global “cure” that Trump has long promised.
“An incredible amount has been done in that short span of time, and so far, not much has gone wrong,” Moore said of the first six months of work to get a vaccine. “The most difficult steps are probably yet to come, all deadlines are rosy, and in the real world, very few things are going faster than planned.”
Scientists will not know for months after distribution of an approved vaccine begins whether it will be effective in the long term or whether there are variations in how it protects different people. Children, for example, will not be included in any of the upcoming Phase III tests. Older people have a weaker immune system and are among the most vulnerable to the virus. A partially effective vaccine may not work for them.
All of these uncertainties are at odds with the political incentive to declare victory over the virus.
“There is clearly a political goal for the president to say, ‘I have delivered a vaccine,'” said Barry Bloom, an infectious disease expert and professor of public health at Harvard. “But we won’t know in three months, or six months, in January, how long the antibodies last.”
Trump advisers in recent weeks have emphasized those low odds that a vaccine will arrive in time to boost his candidacy, urging the president to refocus on more immediate steps and take a more active role in fighting the pandemic.
“We have counseled him on that, and it’s not like he has his head in the sand,” said one campaign aide, who nonetheless lamented Trump’s relative disinterest in the day-to-day response effort. “He looks at it like Mike Pence has understood, Pence is handling it.”
Another Republican close to the administration attributed the focus on a vaccine to internal divisions on how to handle the most pressing aspects of the response, making it easier to unite behind the idea that one shot will end the pandemic of a once for all.
Since then, Trump has returned to the White House briefing room after weeks of sliding poll numbers and increased cases, seeking to regain control of the administration’s response messages. Still, when he stepped onto the podium on Wednesday, Trump returned to the prospect of a quick solution to the crisis.
“That would be great if we could go to the hospital and heal people,” he said. “We believe that in a very short time we will be able to do it.”
Video: Trump: US coronavirus outbreak likely to “get worse before better” (CNBC)
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