US working with India on COVID-19 vaccine, sending ventilators: Donald Trump

White House unveils 'Operation Warp Speed' to ready a vaccine by the end of the year

NEW YORK: As it races against time to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, the US is working "very closely" with India on the project, President Donald Trump has said.

Unveiling 'Operation Warp Speed' to ready a vaccine by the end of the year, Trump said on Friday that "many of the great scientists, researchers" from the US Indian community were working on the project. Underlining the close cooperation between the two countries in fighting "the common enemy", he had tweeted earlier that the US was donating ventilators used to treat COVID-19 patients to India. India, for its part, had lifted a ban on the export of hydroxychloroquine at the personal request of Trump and sent 3.5 million tablets and nine tonnes of ingredients to manufacture it last month.

Trump made a pledge to make the vaccine available to the rest of the world at an affordable cost.

"The last thing anybody is looking for is profit," he said. "People are looking to come up with the answer." Trump said that the US was ready to work with other countries in developing the vaccine and "we have no ego when it comes to this". "We'll be very happy if they are able to do it. We'll help them with delivery. We'll help them with - in every way we can."

"We're working very much with India too," Trump said in reply to a reporter's question and repeated: "We're working very closely also with India. Correct" "We have a tremendous Indian population in the United States. And many of the people that you're talking about are working on the vaccine too. Great scientists and researchers."

Setting a possible year-end deadline, Trump said that the vaccine would be available to all who wanted it in the US and the military, the other arms of the government and the private sector would be fully mobilised to get them out.

He appointed Moncef Slaoui, who is the former head of GlaxoSmithKline vaccines division, to head Operation Warp Speed with General Gustave Perna looking after the logistics. Slaoui said that he was confident the project will "deliver a few hundred million doses of vaccine by the end of 2020".

Trump likened Operation Warp Speed to the Manhattan Project during the World War II when scientists and government officials worked round-the-clock to develop the atom bomb in four years in the belief it would end the war.

Outlining Operation Warp Speed's strategy, Trump said that experts had looked at 100 vaccine projects, narrowed the list down to 14 and were now trying to winnow it further. The government will provide resources to the developers and when they are at the final trial stage, "Operation Warp Speed will be simultaneously accelerating its manufacturing" so that it is available when there is a go-ahead. "It's risky, it's expensive, but we'll be saving massive amounts of time. We'll be saving years if we do this properly." Researchers at Oxford University have one of the most advanced COVID-19 vaccine projects and the Serum Institute of India is partnering with them to produce millions of its does in anticipation of the trials succeeding. (IANS) 

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