"We've got over 100 vaccine candidates that have been discovered," Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told Fox Business Network. "What we're doing now is we're narrowing those down to the core group that we're going to place huge multi-hundred million dollar bets on and scale massive vaccine domestic production so that we by the end of the year, we hope, would have one or more safe and effective vaccines and hundreds of millions of doses." The White House has set a target of having 300 million vaccine doses by the end of 2020. No such vaccine for this pathogen has been approved though a number are under development, and producing and distributing an effective vaccine are seen as key steps to jumpstarting the US economy. However, infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases, said in Senate testimony on Tuesday the idea that there will be a vaccine available by next fall, when schools and universities resume classes, was "a bridge too far."

Source: Dhaka Tribune May 15, 2020 14:37 UTC