President Trump’s top trade and manufacturing adviser Peter Navarro said the administration anticipates that a coronavirus vaccine will be available for mass distribution “as early as January 2021,” a timeline significantly faster than earlier predictions.
“It looks now, it looks — and this is a Trump miracle — it looks now that we may have a vaccine at mass scale as early as January 2021,” said White House Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Navarro on a call to reporters Friday. He said the administration expects half a billion doses to be available by January.
“I think that this is a case where overproducing is far better than underproducing,” he added.
Navarro cited a February article in which White House Coronavirus Task Force member Dr. Anthony Fauci “lays out, rather well, the traditional paradigm” for vaccine development and predicts a timeline that could take up to two and a half years for a vaccine to be produced at scale. “What the Trump administration does is turn that traditional paradigm on its head,” Navarro said.
He credited the administration’s supply-chain innovations for the expedited timeline and praised the “thousands” of administration employees “working 24/7” to protect the country.
“I remember back in February when we were quietly working … to stand up what we envisioned then as a five-horse race for the vaccine development,” he said. “This was back in February. What we understood, even then, was that in order to get this done quickly, we would also have to be standing up factories for the injector technology, the needles, the syringes, the vials, and also the manufacturing capability to produce the vaccine at scale itself.”
Trump, in a news conference, said his administration would partner with medical supplier McKesson Corporation to distribute the vaccine as soon as one reaches final approval.
“We currently have three candidates in phase three clinical trials and are on pace to have more than 100 million doses of the vaccine ready before the end of the year and 500 million doses very shortly thereafter,” Trump said. “And we’re ready, logistically, to distribute them — our military is ready.”
Trump added: “We have a great general who’s in charge, that’s what he does is he distributes things, usually it’s people and weapons, tanks, but in this case, it’s a vaccine or therapeutics.”
