According to a Reuters report, the White House has set a target of procuring 300 million doses of a corona virus vaccine  by the end of 2020. No such vaccine has yet been approved though more than seventy companies are in a race to bring it to market. Distributing a vaccine is seen as a key step to reopening the U.S. economy.

“You know it’s a massive job to give this vaccine,” Trump said in an interview broadcast Thursday on Fox Business Network. “Our military is now being mobilized so at the end of the year, we’re going to be able to give it to a lot of people very, very rapidly.” He said he believes there will be a vaccine by the end of the year and the United States is “mobilizing our military and other forces” on that assumption.

There are many vaccine experts, including Dr Fauci, advisor to the US president, who caution that the vaccine may take eighteen months to develop and that the process is fraught with difficulty, given the previous unsuccessful attempts to develop vaccine for the SARS-1 corona virus. Dr Fauci testified to the US Senate this week, explaining the risk of enhanced immune response that makes the vaccine potentially very dangerous. How can stopping the world to wait for the possibility of a vaccine make sense? Viruses tend to come and go, they mutate, the vaccine may not work now or in the future.