Reuters :Even though the stakes are high for Republican Trump, who is squaring off against former Vice President Joe Biden on Nov. 3, there is no political pressure on the US Food and Drug Administration to quickly approve a vaccine, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Thursday.
“No one is pressuring the FDA to do anything,” McEnany told a press briefing.
Trump has committed billions of federal dollars to rapidly develop vaccines against the virus, which has killed more than 185,000 people in the United States. Critics have said Trump’s lack of leadership on the pandemic has contributed to the world’s highest coronavirus death toll.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has asked state public health officials to prepare to distribute a potential coronavirus vaccine to high-risk groups as soon as late October, according to documents published by the agency.
Pfizer on Thursday said it should know by the end of October whether a COVID-19 vaccine it is developing with German partner BioNTech SE is safe and effective. The US drugmaker said it will seek approval immediately if trial results are positive. It has already manufactured hundreds of thousands of doses.
Still, top US infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci said on Thursday he was not counting on having a vaccine ready that soon.
“These are all guesstimates,” Fauci told CNN, when asked about Pfizer’s comments, adding most experts project a vaccine will be ready by November or December. “It is conceivable that you can have it by October, though I don’t think that that’s likely.”
The CDC “provided states with certain planning assumptions as they work on state specific plans for vaccine distribution, including possibly having limited quantities of vaccines in October and November,” an agency spokeswoman told Reuters.
The New York Times had earlier reported that the CDC had contacted officials in all 50 states and five large cities with vaccine planning information.
