Donald Trump is getting pushback after claiming that a vaccine will be ready within weeks during the Thursday night presidential debate.
“It’s going to be announced within weeks. And it’s going to be delivered. We have Operation Warp Speed, which is, the military is going to distribute the vaccine,” Trump declared.
“There is absolutely *NO* vaccine coming in just ‘a few weeks,’” Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist said on Twitter.
In the ongoing placebo-controlled clinical trials, volunteers are randomly picked to either receive a vaccine candidate or a placebo.
“There is no specified time frame to determine efficacy. What drives the time frame is how frequently disease occurs in those who receive the study vaccine compared to those who receive the placebo vaccine,” William Moss, executive director of Johns Hopkins’ International Vaccine Access Center, told CBS News in September
Moss says that the last step before a vaccine is approved for public use, usually takes two to three years.
“…release a vaccine under the proposed expedited timeline. We could start doing this, you know, next week if we wanted to. But that’s not the way it works,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institue of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
A Gallup Poll taken in September indicated that only half of Americans would take the vaccine if it were available now and complimentary.
