Washington: A safe and effective Covid-19 vaccine will be a reality by the end of the year, Anthony Fauci, America’s leading authority on the pandemic, said on Friday.
I don’t think it is dreaming, I believe it is a reality and will be shown to be a reality, Fauci told a House of Representatives committee about the expected timeline for the vaccine.
The administration of President Donald Trump has launched a programme, Operation Warpspeed, to rapidly produce a vaccine for Covid-19, which, he said, would have a vaccine ready by late Fall (autumn) or early winter.
From everything we’ve seen now, in the animal data, as well as the early human data we see, we are cautiously optimistic that we will have a vaccine by the end of this year and as we go into 2020-21, Fauci said, responding to Democratic Representative Caroline Maloney’s scepticism.
She cited the failure to develop a vaccine for HIV and the five-year delay for an Ebola vaccine to question the speed of developing one for Covid-19.
Fauci explained that there was a significant difference between HIV and coronavirus and how the body responds to them.
I don’t think you can compare them because the body does not make a very good immune response against HIV, so it makes vaccine development very difficult. Whereas, the body does make a robust immune response against coronavirus which tells us that, I believe, that we can get to that goal, he said.
Maloney asked if the US would manufacture Chinese and Russian vaccines, which she said, were being tested in Indonesia and Brazil.