(Washington) One of the men closest to Donald Trump, the national security adviser, has been infected with the coronavirus as the US president bets on the rapid discovery of a vaccine to contain the pandemic COVID – 19, and boost his chances of re-election on November 3.
Posted on 27 July 2020 at 9 o'clock49 Updated to 09 h 28
Ivan Crown
France Media Agency
The US executive announced Monday that Robert O’Brien, who by his post is one of the men most often in contact with the president, had tested positive.
He is not the first presidential aide to be infected, but health precautions at the White House are strict with everyone regularly tested, and the president has so far escaped the virus.
Rather than bringing the economy to a halt, Donald Trump believes that the way out of the health crisis will be through vaccines and drugs.
“The solution will not go through the masks or the closure of the economy, we hope that it will be the American genius who will allow the therapies and the vaccines to prevail”, said his chief of staff Mark Meadows , Sunday on ABC.
Washington has spent at least $ 6.3 billion since March to fund competing vaccine projects, at established labs like Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, and at two small biotech companies that have never proven for a vaccine, Novavax and Moderna.
Not to mention the additional billions to finance the development of treatments against COVID – 16, the construction of production plants, as well as the manufacture of syringes, vials, etc.
Donald Trump will visit the Novavax experimental vaccine production site on Monday, which received $ 1.6 billion in early July.
The leader has baptized Operation “Warp Speed” (a science fiction term meaning “faster than the speed of light”) and does not hide that its objective is to vaccinate America first , far from European discourse on the vaccine as a “global public good”.
The operation has set itself the goal of having 300 millions of doses of a vaccine by January 2021, and since there is no assurance as to the effectiveness of any of the projects, the contracts signed with three of the developers (AstraZeneca, Novavax, Pfizer) are already planning the priority delivery to the United States of 300 million doses, according to public announcements.
“I hope that the authorization process will go very quickly”, said the American president last week by announcing the contract of 1, 95 billion dollars with Pfizer. “We think this is a good one, and other companies behind it are doing very well as well, and are way ahead.”
Large-scale testing
Washington has signed with the two most advanced Western vaccine projects (alongside the Chinese Sinovac and Sinopharm): AstraZeneca (industrial partner of the British University of Oxford) and Moderna, founded in 2010.
Both have started their phase 3 trials, the last and most important, on thousands of volunteers. Johnson & Johnson only started Phase 1 on Monday in Tennessee.
Moderna started phase 3 on Monday in the United States and hopes to recruit over the months 30 000 volunteers (Oxford is testing its vaccine in the UK, Brazil and South Africa).
When will the results be available?
In October at the best of times, perhaps in November, Moderna boss Stéphane Bancel said Monday on CNBC, which would make a pre-election announcement possible.
The fact that the epidemic is growing in the United States, with more than 57 000 positive tests per day, will help Moderna, partner of the National Institutes of Health.
Because half of the participants will receive a placebo. The more of them are infected, the more likely the vaccine will have to prove its effectiveness in half of the participants who will have received it. The Medicines Agency (FDA) has set the threshold of effectiveness at 49% less contamination.
“Unfortunately, as Dr. Fauci (Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases) said, because of all the contaminations in the United States, in the South and now in the West , all this should help development, ”said Stéphane Bancel.
