Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, told Kaiser Health News this week that a vaccine for the novel coronavirus could be available sooner than expected, assuming the clinical trials demonstrate that it’s safe and effective.
Developing a vaccine is usually a process that takes years if not a decade or more. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic claiming hundreds of thousands of lives and disrupting economies across the world, time is of the essence, and the medical and pharmaceutical communities have been racing to get one up and running and deployed as soon as possible.
Indeed, in the U.S., two ongoing clinical trials involving 30,000 human test subjects are in the later stages of the vaccine development process. Recording, compiling, and reviewing the information from those trials is itself a lengthy undertaking, but Dr. Fauci said that, if the early results are overwhelming one way or the other, the trials can be halted prematurely.
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