President Trump doubled down on Friday on his promise to have a coronavirus vaccine available by the end of this year, betting that he can rally the pharmaceutical industry and the government to have one available to nearly all Americans at a speed never before accomplished.

He made his pledge after the government’s senior medical leadership warned repeatedly this week that there was no assurance a safe vaccine would be available as fast as promised by the president, or even for years.

And the President’s credibility on the issue has been clouded by months of overpromising, exaggerating and misleading about other elements of his response to the pandemic, including the availability of testing and the potential of unproven treatments.

With the nation emerging from two months of lockdown, the economy in near-Depression-level crisis and his re-election prospects at stake, Trump cast the rapid development of a vaccine as an important, but not essential, component of returning to normalcy.

“Vaccine or no vaccine, we’re back and we’re starting the process,” he said during an appearance in the Rose Garden.

He introduced a longtime pharmaceutical executive and a four-star general to lead a national effort that he compared in size and speed to the Manhattan Project, the race 75 years ago to build the first atomic bomb.

The new chief of what Trump calls Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slaoui, a former chairman of vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline, called Trump’s goal “very credible”, even though the fastest a new vaccine has been developed and distributed is four years and most have taken considerably longer.

Dr Slaoui, now a venture capitalist, said that he had “recently seen early data from a clinical trial with a coronavirus vaccine, and these data made me feel even more confident that we will be able to deliver a few hundred million doses of vaccine” — enough to inoculate much of the US — “by the end of 2020”.

He did not identify which vaccine he was referring to, but until Friday, when he resigned to take on the new job with the White House, Dr Slaoui served on the board of Moderna, a biotechnology company that has an experimental coronavirus vaccine that just entered Phase 2 of clinical trials to determine if it is effective.

As the chairman of the Moderna board’s product development committee, Dr Slaoui might have been privy to the early indications of tests of whether the company’s approach appeared promising, now that it is being injected into human subjects.

Trump said the government was already moving to ensure sufficient manufacturing capacity to produce any vaccine that is developed and to produce the hundreds of millions of glass vials and syringes needed to hold and inject it. And he said the government would call on the military’s logistics skills to distribute any eventual vaccine as quickly as possible.

“That means they better come up with a good vaccine, because we are ready to deliver it,” he said.

“This will eliminate any unnecessary delay and enable us to begin providing Americans with a proven vaccine the day our scientists say, ‘We are ready, we’ve got it.’” New York Times News Service