Dr. Anthony Fauci told CBS News on Wednesday that the COVID-19 vaccine may be widely available for the general public in April 2021.
- He said the vaccine’s release would “likely be within the first quarter of 2021, by let’s say April of 2021.”
- Fauci said researchers will likely know by November or December whether a vaccine is safe or not for the general public.
- Developers will likely produce a few million doses at the beginning of its release, he said.
Fauci said pauses in trials — like the Johnson & Johnson trial that paused earlier this week — are a sign that companies are taking these experiments seriously. He said it should make anyone nervous about the vaccine’s safety feel better
- “When that happens, we jump all over that,” Fauci said.
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Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, also told CNN that halting trials makes sense and should be expected from companies developing vaccines.
- “The Johnson & Johnson trial is the biggest trial of the vaccine that I know of — 60,000 people. Within that trial you’d expect a few pauses.”