The nation’s top infectious diseases expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, touted the “record time” to launching a phase three trial for a Covid-19 vaccine, noting that the first patient received an initial dose of it just over seven months since the virus was first sequenced.

Speaking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Fauci celebrated the rapid progress of the public-private partnership between the National Institutes of Health and Moderna in creating a trial vaccine, part of the federal government’s so-called Operation Warp Speed.

“The safety data thus far looks good. Now it is crunch time. We are trying to figure out, does it actually work,” Fauci explained, before pegging the first conclusions about the vaccine’s efficacy to late fall. “It is a 30,000 person trial, 15,000 get the vaccine, 15,000 get a placebo. The trial was launched today. This is truly, Wolf, record time. The virus was first put on a public database, the sequence early on in January. We did a phase one trial very soon thereafter. And this is phase three now, which will take several months to determine if, in fact, it does work.”

Fauci then noted that the pool of vaccine volunteers is demographically diverse by age from 18 and up, but also includes a high numbers of Black and Latino patients because the case and fatality data for Covid-19 shows it has had a disproportionate impact on those populations.

“There’s never a guarantee when you’re doing a clinical trial,” Fauci cautioned. “However, I must say in the same breath, Wolf, if you look at the early data, particularly data from phase one trial and looked at the kinds of responses that were induced in those volunteers, there were robust antibody responses. They were of magnitude that you would see in convalescent plasma of individuals who recovered from infection. And that’s one of the hallmarks of prediction of the success of a vaccine.”

Blitzer, however, pressed Fauci on the ability to produce a national vaccine, since the country has struggled with rolling out a widespread testing campaign. “So why should we believe right now that the government, the private companies, for example, will do a better job actually getting people vaccinated once we find a safe and effective vaccine?” he noted.

“Well, this is a public, private partnership, Wolf, that I can assure you is on track and doing very, very well,” Fauci said. “We have a vaccine trial network set up to conduct the trial, so the idea about getting this off the ground and getting the trial conducted, you could almost guarantee that’s going to happen, Wolf. I can’t guarantee you the success of the vaccine because only a clinical trial will determine that, but I can virtually guarantee you that this has got off to a good start, and we will get this trial completed.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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