WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump vowed to use "every plane, truck and soldier" to distribute covid-19 vaccines he hopes will be ready by year's end.
Trump on Friday declared the vaccine program he calls "Operation Warp Speed" will be "unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project."
The goal is to have 300 million doses in stock by January. As the manufacturing side gets into place, the National Institutes of Health is working in parallel to speed the science.
At least four or five possible vaccines "look pretty promising," and one or two will be ready to begin large-scale testing by July, with others to follow soon, NIH Director Francis Collins told The Associated Press.
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"The big challenge now is to go big, and everybody is about ready for that. And we want to be sure that happens in a coordinated way," Collins said.
That year-end goal is a "very bold plan ... a stretch goal if there ever was one," he said in an interview late Thursday.
Worldwide, about a dozen vaccine candidates are in the first stages of testing or poised to begin small safety studies in people to look for obvious problems and whether the shots rev up the immune system. Among those getting the most attention are one created by the NIH and Moderna Inc., and a different type created by Britain's Oxford University.
Current tests "are looking pretty good," Collins said. "But until you put it into the real world and check it out, you don't really know. You can't skip over that really, really hard part of testing this in thousands and thousands of people."
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While Collins' team musters the needed science, Trump on Friday appointed Moncef Slaoui, a former GlaxoSmithKline executive, to lead the broader warp-speed project, along with Army Gen. Gustave Perna, the commander of United States Army Materiel Command.
Slaoui will serve as the chief adviser on the effort, and Perna will be the chief operating officer.
Perna, who runs the Army's complex supply chain, said he was asked by Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to help run the manufacturing logistics related to the vaccine development.
The project also will work on new treatment and testing options, but vaccines are a priority.
"When a vaccine is ready, the U.S. government will deploy every plane, truck and soldier required to help distribute it to the American people as quickly as possible," Trump said in a Rose Garden event.
The World Health Organization and global health leaders have made clear that any vaccine must be shared equally between rich and poor countries. Trump said the U.S. would work with other countries, no matter who found a vaccine first.
"We have no ego when it comes to this," he said. He later added, "The last thing anybody's looking for is profit."
Meanwhile, Trump expressed no concerns Friday about a rapid test that the White House has been relying on to ensure his safety, despite new data suggesting the test may return an inordinate share of false negatives.
Trump expressed his confidence in the test from Abbott Laboratories after a preliminary study by New York University researchers reported problems with it. Trump and his deputies have promoted the 15-minute test as a "game-changer" and have been using it for weeks to try to keep the White House complex safe.
The Food and Drug Administration announced late Thursday that it was investigating preliminary data suggesting the Abbott test can miss a large number of covid-19 cases, falsely clearing infected patients.
"We've got to get to the bottom of it, but we still have confidence in the test or we wouldn't have it on the market," Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told Fox Business Network.
White House officials Friday continued using the Abbot ID Now test. Reporters at the White House underwent the test before Trump's Rose Garden event.
Azar described the FDA warning as a routine announcement that comes after medical manufacturers submit any type of negative information about their product.
In other news, a South Korean medical diagnostics maker has ramped up production and is aiming to sell millions of virus test kits to the U.S..
Osang Healthcare Co., the first South Korean test-kit maker to receive authorization from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration in April, is ready to ship kits that can test 100 million people, Chief Executive Officer Lee Donghyun said in an interview.
Trump has earmarked $25 billion to expand testing in the virus rescue packages allocated to the states. Osang said distributors in 25 states, including Florida, California and Michigan, have expressed interest in the kits and are waiting for the funds to buy them.
Florida's Department of Health said it's not aware of any deal with Osang, and the other states either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.
Information for this article was contributed by Lauran Neergaard, Zeke Miller, Jill Colvin, Matthew Perrone, Aamer Madhani and Michel Biesecker of The Associated Press; by David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman and Noah Weiland of The New York Times; and by Heesu Lee of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 05/16/2020