There won’t be a coronavirus vaccine ready before Election Day, despite Trump’s repeated promises and vaccine makers’ breakneck speed
The president’s last best hope for meeting that deadline fizzled Friday as Pfizer announced that it would not seek emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration before the third week of November. The company is the only frontrunner in the vaccine race that has said it could have proof its vaccine works by Nov. 3.For Trump, the failure to meet that deadline is a self-inflicted defeat.
"It was never going to happen. It was utterly unrealistic," said Lawrence Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. "Vaccines follow a timeline of good science, they don’t follow a timeline of electoral politics." But those projections have always been riddled with caveats. Enrollment in clinical trials to test the shots’ safety and efficacy does not always proceed as quickly as companies would like. Too few people in those trials may be exposed to the virus, delaying the collection of crucial data. And the studies may find that a vaccine is dangerous — or simply doesn’t work.
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