U.S. May Have a Coronavirus Vaccine by 2021
The Claim
The U.S. will have a COVID-19 vaccine ready by 2021.
Emerging story
Despite controversy surrounding the expected date of return, during an interview this week, Dr. Anthony Fauci said that as pharmaceutical companies begin testing possible COVID-19 vaccines, that the U.S. has plans to start manufacturing them by early 2021.
Misbar’s Analysis
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force said during an interview this week that he United States should have 100 million doses of one candidate coronavirus vaccine by the end of 2020.
Fauci made the comments in a Q&A broadcast by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) YouTube channel.
While Fauci said that the vaccines will be manufactured before their true efficacy is determined, he remained “cautiously optimistic” that one will work. "If the body is capable of making an immune response to clear the virus in natural infection, that's a pretty good proof of concept to say that you're going to make an immune response in response to a vaccine," Fauci said.
Fauci added that researchers are still working to determine if those who get infected with COVID-19 all develop immunity, and if so, how long that immunity lasts for.
"I have examples of people who were clearly infected, who are antibody-negative," said Fauci, who said that in those cases, it’s possible that an individual’s antibody counts are so low that a test would be unable to detect them.
Dr. Anthony Fauci recently disclosed during a Q&A with the Journal of the American Medical Association that he thinks a COVID-19 vaccine will be developed by the end of the year. As a result, we label the claim that the U.S. will have a COVID-19 vaccine ready by 2021 as “misleading”, since the vaccine is still being developed and the 2021 projection, while a possibility, is merely speculative.
