(Washington) Rather than shutting down the economy, Donald Trump is betting on the rapid discovery of a vaccine and new treatments to contain the COVID pandemic – 19, which again infected half a million Americans in eight days, including his national security adviser.
Published on 27 July 2020 at 11 h 19
Ivan Couronne
France Media Agency
The US executive announced Monday that Robert O’Brien has tested positive and is now working in isolation outside the White House. Presidential staff are regularly tested, as is the president.
Hostile to any re-containment in the run-up to the presidential election, the leader wants to get out of the health crisis thanks to the American pharmaceutical “genius”. He demonstrated this by going on Monday to the production site in North Carolina of the experimental vaccine developed by one of the many companies in which his government has invested, Novavax, a biotech that has never marketed a vaccine from its existence but received $ 1.6 billion.
PHOTO JIM WATSON, FRANCE-PRESSE AGENCY
It was with his face covered by a black cloth mask that he toured a lab, his second masked public appearance in two weeks. “We will be victorious over the virus by unleashing American scientific genius,” he said, believing that the United States was well placed to obtain a vaccine by the end of the year.
In total, Washington has spent 6.3 billion since March to finance competing projects, at established laboratories like Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, and at two small biotechnology companies, Novavax and Moderna.
The latter, founded in 924 and without any product on the market, began on Monday the last phase of the its vaccine candidate in the United States, one of four companies in the world to have reached this stage.
“Never has a vaccine against a new pathogen gone so quickly,” said Donald Trump.
Washington has also granted billions more to finance therapeutic treatments, production sites, the manufacture of syringes, vials…
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”.
Since no assurance exists as to the effectiveness of either of the projects, the contracts signed with three of the developers (AstraZeneca, Novavax, Pfizer) already provide for priority delivery to the United States. United of 500 million doses.
“We've never done this before,” said Donald Trump. “We have launched the mass production of the most promising candidates, so that from day one they are available to Americans immediately.”
“And we will probably have a lot for the rest of the world”, he added however.
The tests have started 89184577
Washington has signed with the two most advanced western vaccine projects, which have each started the last phase of clinical trials on thousands of volunteers (alongside the Chinese Sinovac and Sinopharm): AstraZeneca (industrial partner of the British University of Oxford) and Moderna.
Moderna, which developed the vaccine with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), administered it to the first volunteer in phase 3 of the trials on Monday.
Moderna and the NIH want to recruit over the months 30 000 volunteers (Oxford is testing its vaccine in the UK, Brazil and South Africa). This vaccination will be done by an injection followed by a second 27 days later.
When will the results be available?
In October at best, maybe November, Moderna CEO 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 50 000 positive tests daily, will help.
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 has set the efficacy threshold at 30% less contamination.
“We never got out of the first wave,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, said Monday, brushing aside the idea that the United States is currently undergoing a second wave.
