Over a dozen potential COVID-19 vaccines are currently under development that could be candidates for a Trump administration program to fast-track for widespread inoculation by January 2021, senior officials within the administration told NBC News.
The program, known as “Operation Warp Speed” whittled down 14 candidates from a pool 93 potential vaccines several weeks ago.
According to officials, those 14 vaccine candidates will undergo testing to further whittle down the number of vaccines to six or eight. This batch of candidates will make it to next rounds of clinical trials. From there, health experts are looking to weed out faulty candidates and come out with three or four vaccines that clear final testing to be used by early 2021.
Of course, none of the 14 chosen vaccines are guaranteed to make it through trials and testing, but the officials who talked to the network were optimistic.
“Can I say with 100 percent certainty? No,” one of the officials told the news source. “There is a reasonable probability that one or more of these vaccines will be successful.”
President Trump Thursday praised the program and said that he would be overseeing the program himself.
Officials noted that program itself would cost billions of dollars. An exact monetary figure wasn’t given, but officials told NBC News that the funds would come from pre-existing government funds. The official added that there was no guarantee that any vaccine that comes from this work would be accessible to all Americans.
The project reportedly includes several federal agencies, including Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, the Pentagon and the Agriculture Department.