Covid-19 vaccine by 2020, says Trump

US President Donald Trump said on Sunday he was confident that there will be a vaccine for Covid-19 by the end of the year.

“We are very confident that we are going to have a vaccine at the end of the year, by the end of the year,” Trump said. “We think we are going to have a vaccine by the end of this year, and we are pushing very hard.”

The comments came during a televised Fox News town hall at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

However, the timeline he presented is even speedier than the optimistic projections laid out by his administration’s public health advisors. Public health officials have said a coronavirus vaccine could take a year to 18 months. Vaccines often take many years to develop and distribute.

But he also acknowledged it was optimistic, "The doctors would say 'well, you shouldn't say that'".

“We are pushing supply lines. We don’t even have the final vaccine,” Trump said. He said “many companies are, I think, close,” citing pharmaceutical maker Johnson & Johnson by name.

Johnson & Johnson, which has partnered with the Department of Health and Human Services to manufacture a vaccine, has said it is hoping to get approval for one in early 2021.

Researchers at Oxford University working on vaccine development have said that theirs, if it proves effective, could be widely distributed by September.

The World Health Organization has said there are currently dozens of coronavirus vaccines in development.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has said a vaccine could take 18 months to develop, though he noted in a CBS News interview last month that it was possible “to shave a couple of months off that.”

“But, you know, you don’t want to over-promise. We’ll just have to see how it goes,” Fauci told CBS.

(Source: CNBC/BBC)

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