US ‘Operation Warp Speed’ To Ready 300 Million Vaccine Doses by End Of 2020

Experts do not expect a vaccine to be ready for at least 12 to 18 months. Under project “Operation Warp Speed”, pharmaceutical companies, government agencies and the military will work together to cut that time by up to eight months. The administration will help biopharma companies coordinate their individual efforts by providing assistance through federal agencies and the US military. The project is similar to the Manhattan Project-style joint initiative which brought different sectors together to develop the nation’s atomic bomb.

The officials are looking at a master trial protocol that would allow researchers to simultaneously study different vaccines instead of studying each vaccine separately through independent studies by pharmaceutical companies. The administration plans to speed up distribution by scaling up manufacturing capabilities as the vaccines enter large human trials. The goal of project “Operation Warp Speed” is to have 300 million doses of vaccine available by January.

In a media interview, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said that developing a vaccine to combat the coronavirus outbreak by January was “doable.” Dr. Fauci said that it was possible to ready hundreds of millions of doses of a coronavirus vaccine by January. However, meeting the January deadline will ultimately depend upon whether the results of trials prove that the vaccine works.

“We're going to start ramping up production with the companies involved and you do that at risk, in other words you don't wait until you get an answer before you start manufacturing, you at risk, proactively, start making it, assuming it's going to work,” said Dr. Fauci. “And if it does, then you can scale up and hopefully get to that timeline.”