Trump Says ‘We Think We’re Going To Have A Vaccine By The End Of This Year’

President Donald Trump participated in a virtual town hall at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday hosted by Fox News’ Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, where he took questions from a wide array of Americans.

COVID-19 survivor Danny Lemos, credited the drug remdesivir with his recovery, and the 39-year-old asked President Trump, “With the FDA approving remdesivir as a drug of choice to help fight this, which is the drug I was on, what are we gonna do and put in place to make sure that there’s enough of this drug available for everybody?”

‘We are very confident that we’re going to have a vaccine at the end of the year’

Trump replied, “It’s a great question because it’s a very hard drug to make, and it takes a period of time, and is made by Gilead, and I know that … Danny, I believe, gave a lot of credit to that drug for saving his life. We are pushing it really hard.”

“We’re also pushing something else, the vaccines,” Trump continued. “We are very confident that we’re going to have a vaccine at the end of the year, by the end of the year, have a vaccine.”

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Baier asked the President for more specifics on his vaccine claim. Trump responded, somewhat repeating himself, “We think we’re going to have a vaccine by the end of this year, and we’re pushing very hard.”

“You know, we’re building supply lines now – we don’t even have the final vaccine … if you look at, Johnson & Johnson is doing it,” Trump said. “We have many companies are, I think, close because I meet with the heads of them and I find it a very interesting subject because it’s so important, but I think we’ll have a vaccine by the end of the year.”

 

Operation Warp Speed

There is a good chance President Trump is referring to the administration’s alleged “Operation Warp Speed” which would put many of the different vaccine candidates on a fast-track.

Bloomberg reported that the operation, “will use government resources to quickly test the world’s most promising experimental vaccines in animals, then launch coordinated human clinical trials to winnow down the candidates. The best prospective vaccines would go into wider trials at the same time mass production ramps up.”

Dr. Fauci Has Expressed Similar Optimism About a Vaccine

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the administration’s top health official in targeting the coronavirus, spoke about the “Warp Speed” vaccine process with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie recently.

Fauci said, “The question is, you always have to say you want to get a vaccine that is safe, and that’s effective, and that you could scale up rapidly.”

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“So what the plan is right now … we’re in the early phases of a trial, Phase 1,” he continued. “When you go into the next phase, we’re going to safely and carefully, but as quickly as we possibly can, try and get an answer as to whether it works and is safe, and if so, we’re going to start ramping up production with the companies involved, and you do that at risk.”

“In other words, you don’t wait until you get an answer before you start manufacturing,” Fauci added. “You, at risk, proactively start making it assuming it’s going to work, and if it does, then you could scale up and hopefully get to that timeline.”