Dr. Fauci feels 'cautiously optimistic' amid search for coronavirus vaccine

As the search for a coronavirus vaccine continues, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is feeling "cautiously" optimistic.

"Given that the body can make a good response against coronavirus, we feel cautiously optimistic that if we mimic safely natural infection with our vaccine, we will be able to induce a response in a person that would be equivalent to the response that natural infection induces," Fauci explained on Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Fauci, a member of President Trump's coronavirus task force, was optimistic that several COVID-19 vaccine candidates will be shown as effective in "a reasonable period of time" and pointed to the promising early data from Moderna, per the Journal, though he added that a major unanswered question is for how long any eventual vaccine might provide protection from the coronavirus.

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"What is a big unknown is what the durability of that protection is," he said. "Is it going to be a year, two years or even maybe, unfortunately, six months or less?" If it provides protection for a fairly short period, he said this might lead to a "secondary problem" in trying to get enough doses out.

Speaking to the Journal of the American Medical Association, Fauci on Tuesday reiterated he's "cautiously optimistic" about getting a vaccine and pointed to the administration's hope of having a few hundred million doses available by the beginning of 2021, per CNN, though some experts have cast doubt on this incredibly tight timeline. But while he's feeling hopeful about the progress, Fauci also noted this week that there's "never a guarantee, ever, that you're going to get an effective vaccine."