The United States should have 100 million doses of one potential vaccine for COVID-19 by the end of the year, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top medical expert on the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’re going to start manufacturing doses of the vaccines way before we even know that the vaccine works, so that by the end of the year the prediction of the statistical analysis and the projection of cases indicate that we may know whether its effective, efficacious or not by maybe November, December, which means that by that time we hopefully would have close to a 100 million doses,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key member of the White House coronavirus task force, said Tuesday during a live video interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“And by the beginning of 2021, we hope to have a couple of hundred million doses,” he added. “So it isn’t as if we’re going to make the vaccine show its effective and then have to wait a year to rev up to millions and millions of doses. Thats going to be done as we’re testing the vaccine.”
A number of clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccine candidates are well underway around the world.
The third and final phase of trials testing an experimental vaccine developed by Massachusetts-based biotech firm Moderna will begin in July. A few other vaccine candidates, including one developed by U.K.-based pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, are also showing promise, according to Fauci.
