What is your assessment of how long it will
take to produce a vaccine, and, of course,
then the issue of mass producing it in sufficient
numbers for the entire planet?
Yeah, it’s a great question.
So, you know, among public health people,
I tend to be on the optimistic side.
So you should know that, because what I’m
going to tell you, obviously, my views, is
a bit more optimistic than I think where most
public health people are.
But that said, let me give you my views on
this.
I am pretty optimistic we’re going to have
a vaccine.
I am very optimistic that that vaccine will
come in 2021.
It’s very, very hard for me to see a vaccine
being safe, effective and widely available in 2020.
I just — I can’t quite figure out how
that would happen.
Obviously, again, love to be wrong, but I
think sometime in 2021, and I’m guessing
probably mid-2021 is my best guess.
Now let’s talk about where we are on vaccines.
There are over a hundred different efforts
to build a vaccine.
There are eight that are in clinical trials,
and a few of them are moving along very nicely.
There’s Moderna.
There’s the Oxford one.
There’s one in — actually, two in China
that are both also potentially promising.
There are others in Europe.
So, there’s a lot of activity here.
I have no idea which of these vaccines will
play out and when, right?
I have no idea which one will turn out to
be safe or effective.
Any of them could.
It could be that we have five or six vaccines
that work.
I don’t know, but I am very confident that
one of them will.
And one of the reasons I’m so confident
is that we have been able to show that we
really can induce immunity to this virus.
We know that people clear the virus.
They get a pretty robust immune response.
And so, scientifically, believing that we’re
going to have a vaccine in 2021, I think,
is a pretty fair assumption.
Now, the other question of — OK, you have
a vaccine, let’s say.
You know, you do the testing.
It’s safe.
It’s effective.
How do we make sure everybody gets it?
And that is going to be a massive challenge.
And there’s a huge set of production issues.
There’s a huge set of distribution issues,
equity issues.
I think it’s incredibly important that people
in India get it, people in Kenya get it, people
in the United States get it, people in China
get it.
And that is going to require a certain amount
of global coordination.
It’s going to require a certain amount of
global solidarity.
And I worry a little bit about kind of where
we are heading — certainly our political
leadership, but other political leaders, too — in terms of that movement towards global solidarity.
