President Trump, faced with multiple crises and falling poll numbers less than five months before the presidential election, is prodding top health officials to move faster on a historically ambitious timeline to approve a coronavirus vaccine by year’s end.
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The goal is to instill confidence among voters that the virus can be tamed and the economy fully reopened under Trump’s stewardship.
In a meeting last month with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar — who is overseeing the effort called Operation Warp Speed, along with Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper — Trump pushed Azar repeatedly to speed up the already unprecedented timeline, according to two senior White House officials familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Trump wants some people to be able to get the vaccine sooner than the end of the year to demonstrate that an end to the pandemic is within reach, according to those officials and two others.
Trump is hardly the only world leader racing to deliver a vaccine as a way to save lives, get people back to work and fully reopen the economy. But some scientists and even several people close to the White House worry that his fixation on the timeline, combined with his past dismissal of scientists’ recommendations, could put regulators under intense pressure to approve some sort of limited use of a vaccine before it has been adequately vetted for safety and effectiveness.
Some go so far as to raise concerns about an “October surprise” in which the administration issues an emergency authorization for a vaccine right before the Nov. 3 election, regardless of whether the research justifies it.
“What worries me is we are coming up to an election, and the administration might be tempted to put its hand into the Warp Speed bucket, and say we have enough information, let’s just give it now,” said Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who is an adviser to the National Institutes of Health effort on vaccines.