A COVID-19 vaccine could be ready for medical professionals this fall and for the general population next spring, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health said Wednesday in laying out a timetable more optimistic than many other experts have proposed.
Kizzmekia Corbett, the lead scientist at the National Institutes of Health working on the coronavirus vaccine, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 it’s “looking like we're on track for” a vaccine that could be available for emergency use this fall.
NIH’s lead scientist for coronavirus vaccine research Kizzmekia Corbett lays out the government’s race to create a vaccine, saying they could be on track to have a vaccine from sequence to the general population within 8 months. https://t.co/FtacDLY6rn pic.twitter.com/hlE34Wz64I
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) April 15, 2020
Most other experts in the field have used a 12-18-month timetable. Still, others have said a 12-18 month goal is “risky” for reasons of safety.
Corbett, though, said her team has benefited from previous research on vaccines.
Asked why her team is moving faster than others, Corbett said, “It is based on several of our previous projects where we were investigating vaccines for MERS and SARS – coronaviruses which are very closely related to the virus that causes COVID-19. ... We've researched coronavirus vaccine development for the last seven years [and] particularly under my direction the team has researched this coronavirus development for five years.
“And so, coming into the onset of this pandemic, we had an idea about what we wanted to do as far as the design of the vaccine,” she said. “... A lot of our work that we've done previously has essentially driven us into what we call a rapid response.”
The goal is to have a workable vaccine by fall for medical workers.
“We're targeting fall for emergency use,” she said. “That would be for health care workers and people who might be in constant contact and [at] risk of being exposed. … And then for the general population our target goal is for next spring. And that is if all things go well – if these phase one, phase two and phase three clinical trials work simultaneously for the good. Our plan is to have people vaccinated all over the world by next spring.”
Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Manjurul, this is a stock photo.
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
