US should "close to 100 mln" doses of COVID-19 vaccine by yearend - Fauci

WASHINGTON, June 3 (KUNA) -- US Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) said Wednesday that the US should have 100 million doses of one potential Covid-19 vaccine by the end of the year.
"We're going to start manufacturing doses of the vaccines way before we even know that the vaccine works, so that by the end of the year the prediction of the statistical analysis and the projection of cases indicate that we may know whether its effective, efficacious or not by maybe November, December, which means that by that time we hopefully would have close to a 100 million doses," Fauci said during a live video interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association.
He added "then by the beginning of 2021, we hope to have a couple hundred million doses." He noted "so it isn't as if we're going to make the vaccine show its effective and then have to wait a year to rev up to millions and millions of doses. That's going to be done as we're testing the vaccine." He indicated that "the vaccine will be tested in people between the ages of 18 and 55, as well as in the elderly and in people who have underlying health conditions," adding "it's going to be the entire spectrum." "I'm cautiously optimistic that with the multiple candidates we have with different platforms, that we are going to have a vaccine that will make it deployable," Fauci remarked.
There are 1,831,821 confirmed coronavirus cases in the US and 106,181 reported deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. (end) si.mb