Trump Says US Will Manufacture Enough Vaccine Doses for Every American by April

President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington on Sept. 18, 2020. (Alex Brandon/AP Photo)

President Donald Trump on Friday said the United States will manufacture enough COVID-19 vaccine doses for every American by April of next year.

The United States will have 100 million vaccine doses of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus by the end of 2020, the president said.

“Hundreds of millions of doses will be available every month and we expect to have enough vaccines for every American by April and again I’ll say even at that later stage, the delivery will go as fast as it comes,” Trump said at a news conference at the White House.

“Massive amounts” of the vaccine “will be delivered through our great military and the general is one of our best and he’s ready to go,” he added. “We are again very advanced on the vaccine, we think that sometime in the very near future we’ll have it,” he said.

It comes after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) director Robert Redfield told Congress that the vaccine won’t be widely available until in the middle of 2021. Trump on Wednesday said that Redfield’s comments were not entirely correct, saying that “under no circumstance will it be as late as the doctor said.”

On Sept. 18, infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, said that “the president was saying is that it is entirely conceivable that we will have an answer by October.”

“My projection is that it would likely be November or December,” Fauci told WTOP. “Let’s say it is November, you could start in December, and you could start giving individuals who are in the high-risk (category), as well as health care workers, vaccines already starting in December into January, February. So, many of the people who actually would need the vaccine the most, the more vulnerable, could already be getting them in the beginning of the year.”

The CDC on Wednesday sent all 50 states a document outlining the distribution plan for delivering a vaccine free of cost to all Americans who want it once one is proven safe and effective. This is not yet the case, even though several companies are in late-stage trials.

The distribution plan has been prepared as part of Operation Warp Speed, a White House-backed initiative to have vaccines ready to ship within 24 hours from the granting of emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration.

The federal government will allocate the first vaccines based on each state’s critical populations that are recommended by the CDC as most as risk from COVID-19.

Mimi Nguyen-Ly contributed to this report.