When will we get COVID-19 vaccine? Fauci ‘cautiously optimistic’ about this timeline
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, testified before a House subcommittee on Friday, saying he was “cautiously optimistic” that we could have a vaccine by late fall or early winter.
“We hope at the time we get into the late fall and early winter, we will have in fact a vaccine that we can say will be safe and effective. One can never guarantee the safety and effectiveness unless you do the trial but we are cautiously optimistic,” Fauci said.
Biotech company Moderna launched a Phase III trial for its COVID-19 vaccine on July 21 and is planning to enroll 30,000 volunteers without coronavirus.
Fauci told CNN that the volunteers will be a “diverse group” and “representative of our society and for those at risk.” Nineteen or 20 percent of the participants are African American and around the same percentage are Latinx, Fauci said.
“You want representation in the trial of those who are most at risk for adverse consequences of getting infected,” Fauci said.
What about other potential coronavirus vaccines?
There are more than 165 coronavirus vaccines being worked on around the world and 27 are in human trials, The New York Times reported.
Pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer and German company BioNTech announced on July 27 that their COVID-19 vaccine was entering Phase II/III trial with 30,000 participants. The trial will take place in the U.S. and countries including Germany, Argentina, and Brazil.
AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford have developed a COVID-19 vaccine and are currently in Phase II/Phase III trials in England and Phase III trials in Brazil and South Africa, according to The New York Times.
The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed seeks to have 300 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine by January 2021.
So far, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has given $483 million in support to Moderna’s vaccine and up to $1.2 billion for AstraZeneca’s vaccine.
More than 4.4 million coronavirus cases have been confirmed and more than 152,000 people have died from the virus in the U.S. as of July 31, according to Johns Hopkins University.
This story was originally published July 31, 2020 at 10:52 AM with the headline "When will we get COVID-19 vaccine? Fauci ‘cautiously optimistic’ about this timeline."