Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said COVID-19 vaccines for the general public may be available by the spring.
His comments come a day after Pfizer and BioNTech announced that one of its vaccine candidates had been found 90% effective in preventing the coronavirus. Azar said Pfizer plans to distribute about 20 million doses of the vaccine each month beginning at the end of November.
“We have anticipated that we will have enough vaccine by the end of December to have vaccinated our most vulnerable citizens in nursing homes and otherwise and by the end of January enough for all healthcare workers and first responders and enough for all Americans by the end of March to early April to have general vaccination programs,” Azar said Tuesday on the Today show.
Azar praised the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency use authorization for Eli Lilly’s monoclonal antibody bamlanivimab, which will treat people who are at risk of severe complications of hospitalization after a COVID-19 diagnosis. He called the efforts part of the “fruits of Operation Warp Speed,” the Trump administration’s public-private partnership to develop and distribute a vaccine and therapeutics for the virus.
Operation Warp Speed aims to produce and deliver 300 million doses of safe and effective vaccines quickly with initial doses to be available by January, according to the HHS website.
On Monday, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said the company began manufacturing vaccines ahead of an emergency use authorization from the FDA. Bourla said the company expects to have up to 50 million doses by the end of 2020 and 1.3 billion next year. None of the experimental vaccines have been approved. Pfizer and BioNTech will seek an emergency use authorization from the FDA after they report additional safety data from the second dose of the vaccination. They expect to have that data by the third week of November.
The news of the developments led to a surging stock market and the strong approval of President Trump, who called it “such great news” in a tweet.
