(WAND) - Dr. Anthony Fauci, America's leading expert on infectious disease, said he's hopeful there will be a COVID-19 vaccine available by the start of 2021.
Biotech firm Moderna has been working quickly through the process of developing a potential vaccine with the help of the National Institutes of Health. Moderna expects to enroll approximately 30,000 people for the start of July's phase 3 trial, CNBC reports.
Fauci said he is either directly or indirectly involved in at least four potential vaccine trials. He told reporters "we hope to have" hundreds of millions of doses by the beginning of 2021.
While saying he's "cautiously optimistic" about vaccine possibilities, Fauci warned he's unsure about the durability of a vaccine. "It likely isn't going to be a long duration of immunity," Fauci said, if COVID-19 acts like other coronaviruses.
“When you look at the history of coronaviruses, the common coronaviruses that cause the common cold, the reports in the literature are that the durability of immunity that’s protective ranges from three to six months to almost always less than a year,” Fauci said. “That’s not a lot of durability and protection.”
Fauci pointed out "there's never a guarantee" with potential vaccines and added "it could take months and months and months to get an answer" about whether a vaccines works. Scientists still don't have some answers to key aspects of the virus, such as how immune systems will respond after someone is exposed. They have said answers would be important to vaccine development.
Should a vaccine be ready in the first half of 2021, it would be done in a record-breaking time frame compared to the development of other vaccines, which can take as long as a decade to produce an effective and safe result. It would be 12 to 18 months since Chinese scientists first identified and mapped the genetic sequence of the virus.
The fastest vaccine development was for mumps. That process took over four years before the final result was licensed in 1967.
COVID-19 has killed at least 375,987 across the world and infected over 6.28 million people, data compiled by Johns Hopkins University shows.
