Trump meets pharmaceutical executives to discuss COVID-19 vaccine
pharmafile | March 4, 2020 | News story | Research and Development | COVID-19, Chinese Coronavirus, Trump, Wuhan Coronavirus, coronavirus
President Trump has met with several representatives of the top pharmaceutical companies to discuss progress being made on a coronavirus vaccine.
Executives from Gilead Sciences, GlaxoSmithKline, Inovio pharmaceuticals, Moderna and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals were all in attendance.
Commenting on the gathering, Trump said: “They’re really working hard and they’re working smart. We had a great meeting with a lot of great companies. They’re going to have vaccines, I think, relatively soon, and they’re going to have something that makes you better, and that’s actually going to take place even sooner. I don’t know what the time will be. I’ve heard very quick numbers, that of months. And I’ve heard pretty much a year would be an outside number.”
However, Trump’s timeline does not seem realistic and Antony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that a deployable vaccine is “going to be, at the earliest, a year to a year and a half.” This is backed up by the pharmaceutical companies with John Shiver, Senior Vice President of global vaccine R&D at Sanofi, who also attended the meeting, saying that a therapeutic for the virus could be developed “months or a very short amount of time, a year or so.”
Gilead’s drug remdesivir, originally developed for Ebola, has been tested since January on coronavirus patients and is currently in clinical trials.
Conor Kavanagh
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