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By Jeff Mason
WASHINGTON, March 2 (Reuters) - The Trump administration
said on Monday it had secured commitments from top
pharmaceutical companies to work together to develop a vaccine
and treatments to fight the coronavirus.
At a meeting with industry executives at the White House,
President Donald Trump exhorted the companies to collaborate to
speed the process of getting a vaccine and therapeutics to
victims of the virus.
The company leaders indicated a willingness to cooperate
with one another, but did not lay out how that would happen.
The White House, which has clashed previously with the
pharmaceutical industry over high drug prices and has been
struggling in recent weeks to show it is on top of the virus
response, saw the meeting as a victory.
"This is all hands on deck. And the news out of this meeting
that you've already formed a consortia ... now we know they will
be working together to create therapeutics and ultimately a new
vaccine," Vice President Mike Pence said as the session drew to
a close.
The global death toll from the illness caused by the new
coronavirus now exceeds 3,000, with more than 60 countries
affected. In the United States, there have been more than 90
cases, with six deaths.
Trump pressed the representatives at the table about their
timeframes for getting a vaccine ready and took upbeat comments
from some of the company leaders to mean that it could be ready
to deploy within months.
"You seem to know what the answer is to this," Trump said.
"Get it done. We need it."
Pressed on whether the vaccine would be ready in the short
timeframe he desired, Trump said he had heard from the leaders
at the table a range of three to four months to a year. But
Anthony Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious diseases, stepped in and urged those at the table to
correct the president's impression.
"He's asking the question: When is it going to be
deployable? And that is going to be at the earliest a year to a
year and a half," Fauci said.
Trump, who has sought to suggest a vaccine would be ready
before health professionals have indicated, followed up after
Fauci's comments: "You think that's right?"
Attendees assured him that treatments, rather than a vaccine
itself, could be ready before that.
Attendees included the chief executives of Gilead Sciences
Inc, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc, Moderna
Inc and GlaxoSmithKline Plc as well as research
and development executives from Pfizer Inc, Johnson &
Johnson and Sanofi SA, all of which are
working on vaccines or treatments for the virus.
Even with Trump voicing hope that the companies can
accelerate their development as much as possible, executives and
other experts have suggested that clinical trials to guarantee a
vaccine is safe and effective could mean that it could take a
minimum of 12 to 18 months to hit the market.
Antiviral treatments could possibly move faster toward
approval.
Pfizer’s chief scientific officer, Mikael Dolsten, told
Trump the company had identified compounds that had a high
probability of being effective against the virus.
After the meeting, Pfizer said in a statement it had
identified some antiviral compounds it owns as potential
treatments for coronaviruses and was working with a third party
to evaluate them.
It said if they proved to be good candidates and passed
toxicology studies, it hoped to start testing them clinically by
the end of the year.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason; Additional reporting by Michael
Erman; Editing by Peter Cooney)
