The former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration said there are concerns about China bringing a coronavirus vaccine to the market before the United States.
“There’s a risk that China may get to a vaccine first. I don’t think their Adenoviral vector vaccine is very good, but they may get it to the market before we do. I think that is a concern,” Scott Gottlieb told CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday.
There are 70 coronavirus vaccines in development across the globe, with three being tested in human trials, the World Health Organization said last week. The furthest along in the process was developed by Hong Kong-based CanSino Biologics and the Beijing Institute of Technology. The other two were developed by U.S. drugmakers Moderna and Inovio Pharmaceuticals.
Researchers are trying to have a vaccine on the market within the next year as the world grapples with the pandemic.
More than 2.3 million coronavirus cases have been reported worldwide, with nearly 163,000 deaths as of Sunday morning, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker.
