If President Trump is going to push drug companies to release a vaccine for the coronavirus, he should do so with an interest in public safety, Joe Biden says.
“It’s great news that scientists are making progress in the search for a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine,” the former vice president and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee wrote in a statement Monday evening. “We all hope the next phases of clinical trials will yield positive results to support an approval based on the scientific evidence, but the development of a new vaccine requires a dedication to science, coordination, transparency, truth, and fairness to all — and we have a President who stands for none of these things.”
In recent weeks, scientists around the globe have made promising findings in the quest to immunize the public from the coronavirus, which has claimed nearly 150,000 lives and infected more than 4.2 million people in the United States alone so far. On Monday, the biotechnology giant Moderna launched the world’s largest coronavirus vaccine trial on roughly 30,000 people across 89 sites to test the new breakthrough.
Trump has long pined for a vaccine to end the pandemic and the economic collapse associated with a shutdown of businesses across the country. In May, Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar announced “Operation Warp Speed,” aimed at producing and distributing 300 million coronavirus vaccines by January 2021. The Department of Defense signed a $1.95 billion deal with firms Pfizer and BioNTech to produce a safe vaccine and 100 million doses.
But should the government pour enormous research and funds into a project such as “Operation Warp Speed,” the president should commit to “three principles of integrity in the development of a vaccine,” argued Biden.
Those include a ban on White House officials pushing “to provide emergency authorizations prematurely,” and the president should not “hype treatments or vaccines, overstate their results, or undermine confidence in scientific findings.”
Biden also called for “clinical data for any vaccine the FDA approves” to be “made available to the public for independent expert review.” He also said before any “license is final” on a new vaccine, “senior career scientists and public health experts” should appear before Congress and testify on its effectiveness.
Both Republicans and Democrats have expressed concerns about a vaccine rushed to the market. A Morning Consult poll found that Republicans are 3 times more likely to say they won’t get the vaccine compared to Democrats.
