President Donald Trump said on Sunday he thinks there will be a vaccine against the new coronavirus disease in the United States by the end of 2020.
“I think we’ll have a vaccine by the end of the year. We’ll have a vaccine much sooner rather than later”, Trump said in the Fox News virtual Town Hall at the Lincoln Memorial.
Trump also said that he would like schools and universities in the country to open in September.
“This virtual teaching is wonderful, but [students] will be fine. We have to go back”, the US president said.
The United States remains the country with the largest number of cases (1,156,924) and the highest COVID-19 death toll (67,451), according to the US-based Johns Hopkins University (JHU), which tracks and compiles data from federal and local authorities, media and other sources.
Globally, the number of coronavirus infections has surpassed 3.5 million, according to JHU. The global death toll from COVID-19 stands at over 247,100. The number of recovered individuals is more than 1,1 million.
At the end of April, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stressed that a vaccine against the coronavirus, when developed, should be universal and available for every individual across the world.
The University of Oxford in England started clinical trials of its coronavirus vaccine last month.
The head of Russian virology research center Vektor, Rinat Masyukov, said at the start of April that the first stage of coronavirus vaccine clinical trials in Russia would begin in June.
