Trump announces a plan to have a coronavirus vaccine ready “by the end of the year” | Society

Donald Trump announced this Friday a public-private plan to accelerate the creation of a vaccine against coronavirus. The US president has explained in an appearance in the gardens of the White House that the federal government will invest in the production of the most promising vaccines and that there are already 14 candidates. “We are trying to obtain it by the end of the year, perhaps sooner,” said the president, in contradiction with the forecast of the health experts, that they calculate that they will not be able to develop it before a year or 18 months. In any case, Trump defended that “with or without a vaccine” the country “is back.”

Dr. Moncef Slaoui, appointed to lead the operation, was also optimistic. The former pharmacist executive told a news conference that he had recently seen encouraging data from an unpublished clinical trial of one of the possible vaccines and that the results made him feel “even more confident” that it is possible to supply “a few hundred million dose of vaccine by the end of 2020. “The goal is to have 300 million doses available by January of next year, a sufficient number to protect practically the entire American population. Slaoui will be the main adviser to the plan, and General Gustave F. Perna will be the chief operations officer.

The plan has been dubbed Operation Warp Speed, which could be translated as “enormously fast”, and without a doubt that is the idea of ​​a project that defies the deadlines of science: a vaccine has never been widely available to the public in such a short period of time as the one They proposed.

The announcement comes as deaths from the pandemic exceed 300,000 worldwide and researchers are struggling to develop a vaccine against the virus. “I don’t want people to think that everything depends on a vaccine,” Trump said, and, citing previous cases, he ventured to say that even if they don’t find a vaccine in the near future, the virus “will disappear at some point, it will disappear.” Epidemiologist Anthony Fauci, who first attended with a mask At the president’s press conference, he did not speak. But he has repeatedly pointed out that because of how effective the virus is in spreading from one human being to another, he does not believe that there is an option that covid-19 “just disappear.”

Optimism to develop a vaccine in just a few more months also collides with the projections of Rick Bright, an infectious disease expert from the US government, fired in mid-April. “A lot of optimism swirls around a period of between 12 and 18 months, if everything goes perfectly,” Bright said Thursday in an appearance in Congress. “We have never seen anything that goes perfectly. My concern is that if we hurry up too much, and cut critical steps, we may not have a correct assessment of vaccine safety, “he added.

The United States faces the “darkest winter in modern history” if its leaders do not coordinate a response to an expected outbreak of the coronavirus by the end of the year, Bright also warned. The projection of a bleak picture comes when Trump is pressuring states to reopen and re-activate the economy, while scientific authorities raise a red flag for the hasty lifting of restrictive measures. Dr. Fauci has already warned that rushing the process can cause deaths and suffering that could be avoided. “We are not going to close the country for five years,” Trump said this afternoon.

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