President Trump said Friday he expects there will be enough COVID-19 vaccines for every American by April 2021.
“We’ll have manufactured at least 100 million vaccine doses before the end of the year and likely much more than that,” Trump said during a press briefing Friday.
“Hundreds of millions of doses will be available every month, and we expect to have enough vaccines for every American by April,” he added.
No COVID-19 vaccine has been proven safe and effective yet by the Food and Drug Administration. But the U.S. has invested in seven potential vaccines, three of which are in phase three trials that will determine safety and effectiveness.
Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, has said the federal government should know by November whether any of the vaccines is safe and effective.
Health workers and people who are most vulnerable to severe COVID-19 illness including the elderly would likely get the vaccine first, while the general public will likely get it sometime next year, Fauci said in an interview with WTOP Thursday.
“If you want to ask the question, what about getting everybody vaccinated so that we can say vaccines have now had a significant impact on how we are able to act in the sense of going back to some degree of normality — that very likely would be in the first half to the third quarter of 2021,” Fauci said.