Health and government officials say they are hopeful that a vaccine for COVID-19 can be found before the end of the year if everything goes right.
Dr. Tom Inglesby, a director at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, that meeting that end-of-year timeline is possible given the number of teams working to make a vaccine a reality.
"So I don't think we should bank on it. But we should hold out some level of hope that if everything goes in the right direction we could possibly see a vaccine by the end of the year," Inglesby said.
On Monday, the maker of the first coronavirus vaccine to be tested on people said early results are promising. Massachusettes-based Moderna said if more rounds of trials go well, the drug could be ready by the end of this year or early 2021.
Meanwhile, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said officials are working to "scale up" production to create a vaccine by then.
"We're going to put the full power of the U.S. government and our private sector towards getting to a vaccine," Azar told CNN's "State of the Union."
Azar says the U.S. government has set a goal of making 300 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine available to the country before 2021. Experts are starting to narrow down which vaccine projects to put what he called "the big financial bets behind."
Contains footage from CNN.
