Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said 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
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.
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.
