Remember, go back in time, I was saying in January and February that it would be a year to 18 months (to develop a vaccine), so January is a year, so it isn’t that much from what I had originally said.” I think that is doable if things fall in the right place. He said, “We want to go quickly, but we want to make sure it’s safe and it’s effective. Fauci, has repeatedly said that it will take at least a year to produce a vaccine.įauci told TODAY on April 30, that the U.S. Slaoui said that based on the data pulled from early clinical trials, he felt confident they could deliver “a few hundred million doses of vaccine by the end of 2020.” However, top health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci stands by as Trump remarks about coronavirus vaccine development in the Rose Garden of the White House on May 15, 2020. Trump said that once the vaccine once is created, he would utilize the military to help speed up distribution. “We’d love to see if we could do it prior to the end of the year,” Trump said, who has appointed Moncef Slaoui, the former head of GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccines division, and Gustave Perna, a four-star Army General, to lead Operation Warp Speed. Trump announced that Operation Warp Speed would be “unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project.” The goal of this initiative is to speed up the development of a proven COVID-19 vaccine, then manufacture and distribute it throughout America as quickly as possible. Francis Collins.ĭuring the White House press briefing on Friday, President Donald Trump unveiled the new federal plan to produce a coronavirus vaccine entitled, “Operation Warp Speed.” Trump explained the plan’s name “means big and it means fast,” an initiative that would accelerate the development and diagnostics of COVID-19. Additionally, the nearly 2 billion dollars awarded to Pfizer will go a long way in the manufacturing and distribution of the Pfizer vaccine in development.US President Donald Trump, with Director, National Institutes of Health Dr. But it also appears to undermine the claim that Pfizer is operating entirely outside Operation Warp Speed.Ī senior administration official told Yahoo News that since “the early days of March when President Trump convened pharmaceutical companies at the White House, Pfizer has been a part of the incredible public-private partnership forged to combat the coronavirus pandemic. Technically, that agreement has nothing to do with the development of the vaccine. While other pharmaceutical companies did take federal funds to develop a vaccine, Pfizer declined to do so, the only one of the major prospective developers to go it alone.Īt the same time, on July 22, Pfizer agreed to a $1.95 billion deal with the Trump administration “for large-scale production and nationwide delivery of 100 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine in the United States following the vaccine’s successful manufacture and approval.” Operation Warp Speed was started in the spring as “a public-private partnership to facilitate, at an unprecedented pace, the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 countermeasures,” according to the Trump administration’s own description of the program. Still, the issue is somewhat more complicated than what social media may lead one to believe. President-elect Joe Biden meets with members of the Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board in Wilmington, Del., on Monday. Trump will want to claim credit for any successes in the coming months, while his detractors will point to forces - private industry, in the Pfizer case - beyond his influence. Vaccines and therapeutics could radically change the course of the pandemic, but they have to be developed, manufactured and distributed. President-elect Biden, meanwhile, is moving ahead with a transition.Īll this is happening as coronavirus cases mount across the land. Trump has still refused to concede the presidential election. The row over Warp Speed is part of what will be a near-certain dispute between the Trump and Joe Biden camps over how to handle the pandemic. The assertion infuriated supporters of the president, who had been promising a vaccine for months, and was also challenged by some who pointed out that the company is on track to receive almost $2 billion from the administration for production. government, or from anyone,” Kathrin Jansen, the company’s vice president for vaccine research, told the Times. We have never taken any money from the U.S. (John Nacion/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
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