Shares of Vir Biotechnology rise as the company looks for a drug for to stop the Coronavirus. CEO George Scangos speaks with CNBC's "Squawk Alley." U.S. health officials are fast-tracking work on a coronavirus vaccine, hoping to start an early-stage trial within the next three months, the Trump administration said Tuesday.
That timeline is optimistic, and a phase 1 trial does not mean “you have a vaccine that’s ready for deployment,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. It could take a year or more before a vaccine is ready for sale to the public, he said.
“It will take three months to get it into the trial, three months to get safety, immunogenicity data,” Fauci said during a press briefing on the nation’s response to the coronavirus. The virus has killed 106 people in mainland China and infected nearly 4,700 worldwide, including in the United States.
“Then you move into phase 2. What we do from that point on will be determined by what has happened with the outbreak over those months,” he said. “We are proceeding as if we will have to deploy a vaccine. In other words, we are working on the worst scenario that this becomes a bigger outbreak.”
The National Institutes of Health is working with biotech company Moderna to develop the vaccine using the current strain of the coronavirus, Fauci said, adding that Chinese health authorities were able to isolate the virus and have shared its sequence on a public database.
“Given the technology of the 21st century, we were able to use that sequence, pull out the genes of the glycoprotein spike of the particular coronavirus and make that the immunogen to be used in a vaccine,” Fauci said.
There are currently no proven therapies for the novel coronavirus, which authorities believe originated from a seafood market in China. Hong Kong researchers claimed Tuesday they have already developed a vaccine for the virus but warned that it will “take months” to test the vaccine on animals and another year to conduct trials on humans before it is ready.
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