Trump Administration Selects Five Coronavirus Vaccine Candidates as Finalists

The White House is eager to project progress, but the public-private partnership it has created still faces scientific hurdles, internal tensions and questions from Congress.

The Trump administration has selected five companies as the most likely candidates to produce a vaccine for the coronavirus. By narrowing down the pool of companies, the federal government is choosing to focus on what they hope to be the most promising vaccine projects at an early stage, accelerate the process of which vaccines work best, and ensure the winner or winners can be quickly manufactured in huge quantities and distributed across the country. The five companies include Moderna, a Massachusetts-based biotechnology firm; the combination of Oxford University and AstraZeneca; and three large pharmaceutical companies: Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Pfizer. Although each company is taking their own approach, they are all working towards the same goal. According to government officials, the announcement of the final decision will be made at the White House in the next few weeks. On Tuesday June 2nd, top government epidemioologist and director of the National Institue of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, told a medical seminar that “by the beginning of 2021 we hope to have a couple of hundred million doses.”