Dr. Anthony Fauci said this morning that hundreds of millions of doses of a vaccine for COVID-19 could be ready by January.

In an interview on the Today Show, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that a vaccine candidate is in the first phase of a clinical trial. If the second phase shows it is safe and effective, “we’re going to start up ramping up production with the companies involved,” Fauci said. “You do that at risk. In other words, you don’t wait until you get an answer before you start manufacturing, you at-risk, proactively, start making it, assuming it’s going to work. And if it does, then you can scale up and hopefully get to that timeline. So we want to go quickly, but we want to make sure it’s safe and it’s effective. I think that is doable if things fall in the right place.”

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