Trump Rebukes CDC Director Over Comments on Covid-19 Vaccine, Masks | Your World Daily

(Sept. 16) Top U.S. health officials offered conflicting estimates Wednesday of when Americans should expect coronavirus vaccines to be widely available, with one saying in an interview that every American could be able to get a shot by the end of March.

That timetable, offered by Paul Mango, deputy chief of staff for policy at the Department of Health and Human Services, is more ambitious than those of drug company executives, U.S. health officials Anthony Fauci and Robert Redfield, and most public health experts. It follows comments by President Donald Trump on Tuesday that a vaccine could get emergency approval in 3 to 4 weeks.

“We are under contract to get enough doses, and we have a line of sight right now into the clinical trials such that we believe” a vaccine will be cleared before the end of the year, Mango said in an interview. “The combination of those two will permit us to vaccinate every American before the end of first quarter 2021.”

It’s a timeline, though, that depends on a great many assumptions, including that the first vaccine approved for emergency use works at a high level, that there are no major safety issues or delays within the first groups that receive it, and that the manufacturing and disbursement of the vaccine goes off without a hitch.

Fauci, the head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called the first-quarter time line for full vaccine use “aspirational” in an interview Wednesday. It’s more likely, he said, that it happens more toward the middle to the end of 2021. “It depends on what the vaccine is.”

In an interview for the Bloomberg Equality Summit to take place on Sept. 23, Fauci said he’s “reasonably confident” that at least one vaccine will be available by November or December. Widescale adoption of a vaccine, along with continuing -- though less intense -- reliance on social distancing and mask-wearing will allow a return to near-normal by the end of 2021, he said.

By then, Fauci said, “I believe we can approach and perhaps reach a degree of normality that closely resembles what we had before this particular outbreak occurred.”

Redfield, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was also less optimistic than Mango in Senate testimony given Wednesday.

“If you’re asking me when is it going to be available to the American public,” Redfield said to a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing, “I think we’re probably looking at late second quarter, third quarter 2021,” which would suggest some time in late spring or summer of next year.

Public-health experts and drugmakers have expressed alarm that the White House is placing extraordinary pressure on the FDA to clear a vaccine before Trump stands for re-election on Nov. 3.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who served under the Trump administration, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that it’s “atypical” that the approval process of any drug or vaccine would be discussed within a political context.

“I don’t think we’re going to see an authorization before the election,” said Gottlieb, who sits on Pfizer Inc.’s board of directors. He added that the American public is more likely to receive the inoculations within the first half of 2021.

Fauci, meanwhile, said he was confident existing checkpoints for approval, including an independent data and safety monitoring board, would prevent interference.

The U.S., through it’s “Operation Warp Speed” program, has already secured supply of coronavirus vaccines furthest along in clinical trials, including those being developed by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, AstraZenca Plc in partnership with the University of Oxford, and Moderna Inc.

Operation Warp Speed was formed by the Trump administration to unite health agencies and the Department of Defense with the objective of accelerating the development and production of a coronavirus vaccine. The medicines typically require years to develop and test before they’re approved for sale.

Mango, speaking in a telephone interview, said the administration is confident it will have 100 million doses of an effective vaccine for elderly people, who are more vulnerable to the virus, available before the end of the year. He stressed that “there’s never a 100% guarantee” that timelines will be met.

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