Health official contradicts Trump: Coronavirus vaccine will take more than a year

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, at a March 11 hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee:

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: With regard to vaccines, as I’ve mentioned publicly many times: We were able to very quickly go from an understanding of what this virus was to what the genetic sequence was to actually developing a vaccine.

 

But there’s a lot of confusion about developing a vaccine.

 

In the next, I would say, four weeks or so, we will go into what is called a Phase I clinical trial to determine if one of the candidates — and there are more than one candidate. There are probably at least 10 or so that are at various stages of development.

 

The one that we’ve been talking about is one that involves a platform called “Messanger RNA.” But it really serves as a prototype for other types of vaccines that are simultaneously being developed. Getting it into Phase I in a matter of months is the quickest that anyone has ever done literally in the history of vaccinology.

 

However, the process of developing a vaccine is one that is not that quick.

 

So, we go into Phase I. It’ll take about three months to determine if it’s safe. That’ll bring us three or four months down the pike.

 

And then you go into an important phase, called Phase II, to determine if it works. Since this is a vaccine, you don’t want to give it to normal, healthy people with the possibility that A) it will hurt them, and B) that it will not work. So the phase of determining if it works is critical.

 

That will take at least another eight months or so. So when you’ve heard me say we would not have a vaccine that would even be ready to start to deploy for a year to a year and half, that is the time frame.

 

Now anyone who thinks they’re going to go more quickly than that, I believe, will be cutting corners that would be detrimental.

 

What does that tell us? That tells us now, the next month, the next several months, we’re going to have to rely on public health measures to contain this outbreak.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.