(CNSNews.com) - President Donald Trump announced a medical initiative on Friday called Operation Warp Speed to speed up production of a COVID-19 vaccine and make it available to the public, but he said, “Vaccine or no vaccine, we are back.”
The quest for a vaccine began in the beginning of the year when scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) “began developing the first vaccine candidate on January 11th,” the president noted.
“Think of that. Within hours of the virus' genetic code being posted online. So, January 11th, most people never even heard what was going on January 11th, and we were out there trying to develop a vaccine, not even knowing what we were up against. Then, my administration cut through every piece of red tape to achieve the fastest ever, by far, launch of a vaccine trial for this new virus, this very vicious virus,” he said.
NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have been “working constantly with private industry to evaluate more than 100 potential treatments.” In addition, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “swiftly approved more than 130 therapies for active trials.”
“That's what we have right now - 130 - and another 450 are in the planning stages. Tremendous potential awaits. I think we're going to have some very interesting things to report in the not-too-distant future,” Trump said, adding that his administration “through a historic series of funding bills” is providing $10 billion to support a medical research effort.
“Today I want to update you on the next stage of this momentous medical initiative. It's called Operation Warp Speed - that means big, and it means fast - a massive scientific, industrial, and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project. You really could say that nobody’s seen anything like we're doing, whether it's ventilators or testing. Nobody’s seen anything like we are doing now within our country since the second World War,” he said.
The objective of Operation Warp Speed “is to finish developing and then to manufacture and distribute a proven coronavirus vaccine as fast as possible. Again, we would love to see if we can do it prior to the end of the year. We think we are going to have some very good results coming out very quickly,” Trump said.
“While we accelerate the final phases of vaccine trials, Operation Warp Speed will be simultaneously accelerating its manufacturing and manufacturing process. In other words, we are getting ready. So when we get the good word that we have the vaccine, we have the formula. We have what we need. We are ready to go,” he said.
“As opposed to taking years to gear up. We are gearing up. It's risky, it's expensive, but we will be saving massive amounts of time. We’ll be saving years if we do this properly, and that's what we're doing. So we are gearing up on the assumption that we will have, in the near future, relatively near future, a vaccine,” the president said.
"Typically, pharmaceutical companies wait to manufacture a vaccine until it has received all of the regulatory approvals necessary, and this can delay vaccines availability to the public as much as a year and even more than that. However, our task is so urgent that, under Operation Warp Speed, the federal government will invest in manufacturing all of the top vaccine candidates before they are approved,” Trump added.
The president said that the U.S. military will use its resources to deliver the vaccine.
“When a vaccine is ready, the U.S. government will deploy every plane, truck, and soldier required to help distribute it to the American people as quickly as possible,” he said.
“Vaccine or no vaccine, we are back, and we are starting the process. In many cases, they don't have vaccines, and a virus or a flu comes, and you fight through it. We haven't seen anything like this in 100 and some odd years - 1917,” Trump said.
“But you fight through it, and people sometimes, I guess -- we don't know exactly yet, but it looks like they become immune or at least for a short while, maybe for life, but you fight through it,” he said.