National security adviser says US will develop a coronavirus vaccine first

National security adviser Robert O’Brien said Sunday the U.S. will be the first country to develop a coronavirus vaccine. 

“We’re going to get to the vaccine first. We’re doing tremendous work on therapies and vaccines and once we get them, we’ll share them not only with America, but we’ll share them with the world,” O’Brien said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” 

{mosads}O’Brien said the U.S. is “moving rapidly using American innovation” to develop vaccines as well as therapeutics to treat COVID-19. 

“We’re going to stop the Chinese from hacking into our universities to steal that information. And we’re going to get the vaccine and we’re going to get out to the whole world and I think America is going to come out on top on this one,” he said. 

Dr. Dan Barouch, the Director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, urged global cooperation to develop a vaccine during in an interview on “Meet the Press” 

Barouch said the world needs “multiple vaccines because there are seven billion people in the world.” 

“So, this is not a race to be first. This is a global cooperation, in which multiple regions of the world and multiple companies need to work together to develop vaccines for a very, very large number of people,” he said. 

Globally the virus has infected more than 4.3 million people and killed 342,694 people, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. 

The U.S. has been the hardest hit country, reporting more than 1.6 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and 97,149 deaths, based on the same database.