Trump official thinks coronavirus vaccine can be ready by the end of the year, citing early data

President Trump on Friday announced the appointment of two officials to a project focused on speeding up development of a coronavirus vaccine, with one expressing confidence over an optimistic end of 2020 timeline.

Trump on Friday said pharmaceutical conglomerate GlaxoSmithKline's former chair Moncef Slaoui and Army General Gustave Perna will head this Operation Warp Speed project. Some experts have described having a COVID-19 vaccine developed in 12 to 18 months as possible if efforts go smoothly, while others have described this timeline as overly optimistic.

In a Rose Garden press conference, Slaoui called the project's objectives "extremely challenging' but "credible," and he said that based on "early data" he's seen from a clinical trial, he feels "even more confident that we will be able to deliver a few hundred million doses of vaccine by the end of 2020. And we will do the best we can to do that."

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Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, perviously said it's "doable" to have hundreds of millions of doses of a coronavirus vaccine ready by January, although he warned that this is only "if things fall in the right place." But on Thursday, Dr. Rick Bright, the ousted federal official and whistleblower who was leading coronavirus vaccine development, was far less confident in this timeline when he testified before Congress.

"A lot of optimism is swirling around a 12 to 18 month timeframe, if everything goes perfectly," Bright said. "We've never seen everything go perfectly. ... I still think 12 to 18 months is an aggressive schedule, and I think it's going to take longer than that to do so." Brendan Morrow