Coronavirus: Fauci says vaccine possible by end of 2020

A top government health official thinks there’s a chance for relief from the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic on the horizon in the form of a vaccine he said may be ready by the end of 2020.

In a CNN interview May 27, Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said that, if everything goes right, a vaccine could be available in November or December of this year.

“We have a good chance, if all the things fall in the right place, that we might have a vaccine that would be deployable by the end of the year, by November-December,” he said in the interview.

Fauci has been one of the most visible members of the White House coronavirus task force and has broken with the Trump administration on many facets of the country’s response to the pandemic; a move that has made him a key source of trusted information on the disease.

The pandemic has claimed more than 100,000 American lives as of May 27, and while many states seek to reopen and lift stay-at-home measures aimed at slowing the spread of COVID-19, a plethora of polls have shown that the public does not believe it is safe to do so yet.

Previously, the U.S. Health Department’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority gave drug manufacturer AstraZeneca more than $1 billion to develop, produce, and deliver a possible vaccine currently being tested in southern England.

According to the World Health Organization, there are currently 10 candidate vaccines in clinical evaluation worldwide, and 115 candidate vaccines in preclinical evaluation.