Coronavirus: Trump corrected by expert on task force after he claimed vaccine would be ready within months
President Donald Trump was corrected by a health expert on his coronavirus task force after he claimed that a vaccine to combat the disease would be ready within the year. Trump had made the remark after he was asked about a potential timeline for a vaccine during a Cabinet Room meeting with pharmaceutical executives and members of his task force.
"I don't know what the time will be. I've heard very quick numbers, that of months," he said. "And I've heard pretty much a year would be an outside number. So I think that's not a bad range. But if you're talking about three to four months in a couple of cases, a year in other cases."
Dr. Antony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, moved quickly to dismiss Trump's statement and suggested that estimate was entirely unrealistic. "Let me make sure you get the ... information," he told Trump. "A vaccine that you make and start testing in a year is not a vaccine that's deployable."
Fauci's explanation of a proper timeline did not please the president, who was snapped folding his arms in irritation. "So he's asking the question -- when is it going to be deployable? And that is going to be, at the earliest, a year to a year and a half, no matter how fast you go," the doctor said.
Trump, however, wanted a second opinion and turned to the other pharmaceutical executives at the table for their take on when a vaccine could be ready. To his chagrin, all the experts, from both his administration and the pharmaceutical industry, backed Fauci.
"So you're talking over the next few months, you could have a vaccine?" Trump asked Stéphane Bancel, the CEO of Moderna, a biotechnology company.
Bancel admitted they could have a vaccine in that time frame but that it would, at that point, only be in phase two testing and not ready for clinical trials.
"He wouldn't have a vaccine. He'd have a vaccine to go into testing," Fauci further clarified, adding once again that a vaccine proper would only be ready in a year or a year-and-a-half.
Trump again brought up that one executive who was "talking about two months," to which Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar replied and said Regeneron, a biotechnology company that was represented in the room, would be ready for only phase one testing in that time.
The consensus in the room was that a vaccine could not be rushed to the market before it was declared safe for the public, a point further emphasized by Leonard Schleifer, the CEO of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. "Vaccines have to be tested because there's precedent for vaccines to actually make diseases worse," he said. "You don't want to rush and treat a million people and find out you're making 900,000 of them worse."
Trump eventually conceded that the experts were in the right, but said, "Get it done. We need it. We want it fast."