Baystate Health reported seven new confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours.
Baystate Health has tested just under 17,000 people in Western Massachusetts. Of those, 15,008 came back negative, 1,842 positive and 142 are still pending results.
As testing has been expanded to include more people, the percentage of people testing positive has declined from 23% in mid April to just over 11% this month.
As of Saturday, the health care system is caring for 24 hospitalized patients with confirmed COVID-19 infection, five of whom are in critical care units. An additional 23 are under investigation for possible COVID-19.
Baystate Medical Center in Springfield is caring for 23 of the confirmed cases and 11 under investigation. Baystate Wing Hospital in Palmer is caring for one confirmed case and two under investigation. Baystate Noble Hospital in Westfield is caring for one under investigation. Baystate Franklin Medical Center in Greenfield is caring for two under investigation.
The number of confirmed COVID-19 patients at Baystate Health hospitals peaked on April 9 at 179.
Two new cases of COVID-19 were announced in Manitoba on Saturday.
The update means the total number of cases identified in the province is 303,the province posted on social media.
Data on testing, active cases, hospitalizations and recoveries will be updated again on Monday.
On Friday, one new case of the illness caused by the new coronavirus was announced in the province.
As of Friday, there were five active cases in Manitoba, while 289 people had recovered.
The number of deaths related to COVID-19 remained at seven, and there was no one inhospital with the illness.
The total number of tests for the coronavirus performed in Manitoba was52,255.
COVID-19 cases since reopening fall within expectation levels, say public health officials KRCRTV.COM
COVID-19 (coronavirus) vaccine: Get the facts
A vaccine to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is perhaps the best hope for ending the pandemic. Currently, there is no vaccine to prevent infection with the COVID-19 virus, but researchers are racing to create one.
Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that cause illnesses such as the common cold, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). COVID-19 is caused by a virus that's closely related to the one that causes SARS. For this reason, scientists named the new virus SARS-CoV-2.
While vaccine development can take years, researchers aren't starting from scratch to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Past research on SARS and MERS vaccines has identified potential approaches.
Coronaviruses have a spike-like structure on their surface called an S protein. (The spikes create the corona-like, or crown-like, appearance that gives the viruses their name.) The S protein attaches to the surface of human cells. A vaccine that targets this protein would prevent it from binding to human cells and stop the virus from reproducing.
Past research on vaccines for coronaviruses has also identified some challenges to developing a COVID-19 vaccine, including:
Global health authorities and vaccine developers are currently partnering to support the technology needed to produce vaccines. Some approaches have been used before to create vaccines, but some are still quite new.
Live vaccines use a weakened (attenuated) form of the germ that causes a disease. This kind of vaccine prompts an immune response without causing disease. The term attenuated means that the vaccine's ability to cause disease has been reduced.
Live vaccines are used to protect against measles, mumps, rubella, smallpox and chickenpox. As a result, the infrastructure is in place to develop these kinds of vaccines.
However, live virus vaccines often need extensive safety testing. Some live viruses can be transmitted to a person who isn't immunized. This is a concern for people who have weakened immune systems.
Inactivated vaccines use a killed (inactive) version of the germ that causes a disease. This kind of vaccine causes an immune response but not infection. Inactivated vaccines are used to prevent the flu, hepatitis A and rabies.
However, inactivated vaccines may not provide protection that's as strong as that produced by live vaccines. This type of vaccine often requires multiple doses, followed by booster doses, to provide long-term immunity. Producing these types of vaccines might require the handling of large amounts of the infectious virus.
This type of vaccine uses genetically engineered RNA or DNA that has instructions for making copies of the S protein. These copies prompt an immune response to the virus. With this approach, no infectious virus needs to be handled. While genetically engineered vaccines are in the works, none has been licensed for human use.
The development of vaccines can take years. This is especially true when the vaccines involve new technologies that haven't been tested for safety or adapted to allow for mass production.
Why does it take so long? First, a vaccine is tested in animals to see if it works and if it's safe. This testing must follow strict lab guidelines and generally takes three to six months. The manufacturing of vaccines also must follow quality and safety practices.
Next comes testing in humans. Small phase I clinical trials evaluate the safety of the vaccine in humans. During phase II, the formulation and doses of the vaccine are established to prove the vaccine's effectiveness. Finally, during phase III, the safety and efficacy of a vaccine need to be demonstrated in a larger group of people.
Because of the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine regulators might fast-track some of these steps. But it's unlikely that a COVID-19 vaccine will become available sooner than six months after clinical trials start. Realistically, a vaccine will take 12 to 18 months or longer to develop and test in human clinical trials. And we don't know yet whether an effective vaccine is possible for this virus.
If a vaccine is approved, it will take time to produce, distribute and administer to the global population. Because people have no immunity to the COVID-19 virus, it's likely that two vaccinations will be needed, three to four weeks apart. People would likely start to achieve immunity to the COVID-19 virus one to two weeks after the second vaccination.
A lot of work remains. Still, the number of pharmaceutical companies, governments and other agencies working on a COVID-19 vaccine is cause for hope.
Until a COVID-19 vaccine is available, infection prevention is crucial. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend following these precautions for avoiding infection with the COVID-19 virus:
If you have a chronic medical condition and may have a higher risk of serious illness, check with your doctor about other ways to protect yourself.
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As the world waits for a coronavirus vaccine, some scientists are proposing that existing vaccines could give the bodys immune system a much-needed temporary boost to stave off infection.
Its still unclear whether such an approach would work, and some experts are skeptical. Others including researchers in Israel, the Netherlands and Australia are already investigating whether a tuberculosis vaccine could help jump-start the immune system and make COVID-19 less deadly, though the World Health Organization strongly advises against using that vaccine until its proven effective against the coronavirus.
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In the U.S., several big names in virology including Dr. Robert Gallo, the director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and one of the scientists who discovered HIV are turning their attention to another existing vaccine, the oral poliovirus vaccine. It hasnt been licensed or available in the U.S. since 2000, but is still used in other countries where poliovirus still circulates, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Polio was eradicated in the U.S. in 1979.)
In a perspective piece published Thursday in the journal Science, Gallo and other experts from the Baltimore-based Global Virus Network outline why this particular polio vaccine might hold potential and why the group is seeking funding and approval to start clinical trials to test their hypothesis.
The polio vaccine in question is a live vaccine meaning it uses a weakened form of the live virus.
Live vaccines trigger a general immune response that helps the body fight off invaders until the immune system has time to develop specific antibodies. In theory, scientists believe that this temporary immune boost could provide protection for viruses the vaccine was not designed to prevent, such as the coronavirus, said a co-author of the Science piece, Dr. Konstantin Chumakov, a member of the Global Virus Network, an international coalition of virologists aimed at preventing and eradicating virus disease.
(Chumakov is also associate director of research at the U.S. Food and Drug Administrations Office of Vaccines, but spoke to NBC News on behalf of the Global Virus Network, not the FDA.)
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Using existing live vaccines, including the oral poliovirus vaccine, would not be a permanent solution, but rather a temporary fix that may buy time until a coronavirus vaccine hits the market, Chumakov said.
The protection would wane with time, but the beginning of an outbreak is an important time to keep the virus from spreading, said Chumakov, noting that unlike the vaccine for tuberculosis, there are three types of oral poliovirus vaccine that could be administered back-to-back as soon as the immunity-boosting effects of one wears off, potentially extending such temporary protection.
The potential protection from the vaccine remains hypothetical, however, which is why Chumakov and others are calling for clinical trials.
In places where its still used, the oral poliovirus vaccine is typically administered to babies and not adults, so scientists cant simply look at whether it already works to boost the immune system against other viruses in adults in these populations.
Chumakov referred to a three-year controlled trial conducted in Russia in the 1960s as the strongest evidence in support of using disease-specific vaccines to broadly ward off other viruses. In the study, which was conducted by Chumakovs mother, researchers concluded that giving adults doses of the oral poliovirus vaccine cut deaths due to seasonal influenza and acute respiratory diseases three-fold.
Chumakov and his co-authors also cite other studies and anecdotes in which an oral poliovirus vaccine has effectively prevented another strain of poliovirus, which the vaccine was not specifically designed to treat.
However, other experts in the field are skeptical that the polio vaccine would provide the needed boost, and view the existing research as flimsy at best.
I do believe the oral polio vaccine would provide some protection against new viruses, but so would catching cold, said Rachel Roper, associate professor of microbiology and immunology at East Carolina Universitys Brody School of Medicine. Catching any virus, she said, would set up the antiviral state associated with enhanced immunity.
Roper also expressed concern that administering a live vaccine that does not specifically target COVID-19 could create competition called immunodominance that prompts the immune system to target the live vaccine while leaving few resources to fight off COVID-19.
We wont see safety concerns until we test it in large trials that include a lot of people, Roper said.
Indeed, the oral polio vaccine shouldnt be given in an attempt to prevent COVID-19 outside of a clinical trial.
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Adam Lauring, an associate professor of microbiology, immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Michigan, said that if the oral poliovirus vaccine is proven to be effective, everyone would need to get the vaccine at the same time for it to work as planned, which would require a coordinated response with its own logistical challenges.
Theres also the issue of some people already having immune responses against some vaccines, which means this could impede some of the antibody responses we would want, said Lauring. In other words, the oral polio vaccine may not boost the immune system, as the theory proposes, in people who have already received a polio vaccine.
Its a good idea, but we dont know how it would pan out. There is some epidemiological evidence that is a sign that its something worth looking into, he said.
Chumakov estimates that it would cost $13 million to vaccinate the entire U.S. population, a relatively cheap solution if it works, and could provide a leg-up on future pandemics.
This pandemic will go, but there will be another one. We will continue to get new and emerging diseases, and there will always be this dilemma of what do we do in the interim before we can develop a specific vaccine, Chumakov said. This is much bigger than just stopping COVID-19.
CLARIFICATION (June 12, 2020, 12:12 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article omitted Dr. Robert Gallo's title. He is the director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
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LAURAN NEERGAARD AP Medical Writer
June 11, 2020, 6:19 PM
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The first experimental COVID-19 vaccine in the U.S. is on track to begin a huge study next month to prove if it really can fend off the coronavirus, while hard-hit Brazil is testing a different shot from China.
Where to do crucial, late-stage testing and how many volunteers are needed to roll up their sleeves are big worries for health officials as the virus spread starts tapering off in parts of the world.
Moderna Inc. said Thursday the vaccine it is developing with the National Institutes of Health will be tested in 30,000 people in the U.S. Some will get the real shot and some a dummy shot, as scientists carefully compare which group winds up with the most infections.
With far fewer COVID-19 cases in China, Sinovac Biotech turned to Brazil, the epicenter of Latin America's outbreak, for at least part of its final testing. The government of So Paulo announced Thursday that Sinovac will ship enough of its experimental vaccine to test in 9,000 Brazilians starting next month.
If it works, with this vaccine we will be able to immunize millions of Brazilians, said So Paulos Gov. Joao Doria.
Worldwide, about a dozen COVID-19 potential vaccines are in early stages of testing. The NIH expects to help several additional shots move into those final, large-scale studies this summer, including one made by Oxford University that's also being tested in a few thousand volunteers in Brazil.
There's no guarantee any of the experimental shots will pan out.
But if all goes well, there will be potential to get answers on which vaccines work by the end of the year, Dr. John Mascola, who directs NIHs vaccine research center, told a meeting of the National Academy of Medicine on Wednesday.
Vaccines train the body to recognize a virus and fight back, and specialists say it's vital to test shots made in different ways to increase the odds that at least one kind will work.
Sinovac's vaccine is made by growing the coronavirus in a lab and then killing it. So-called whole inactivated vaccines are tried-and-true, used for decades to make shots against polio, flu and other diseases giving the body a sneak peek at the germ itself but growing the virus is difficult and requires lab precautions.
The vaccine made by the NIH and Moderna contains no actual virus. Those shots contain the genetic code for the aptly named spike protein that coats the surface of the coronavirus. The body's cells use that code to make some harmless spike protein that the immune system reacts to, ready if it later encounters the real thing. The so-called mRNA vaccine is easier to make, but it's a new and unproven technology.
Neither company has yet published results of how their shots fared in smaller, earlier-stage studies, designed to check for serious side effects and how well people's immune systems respond to different doses.
Even before proof that any potential vaccine will work, companies and governments are beginning to stockpile millions of doses so they can be ready to start vaccinating as soon as answers arrive.
In the U.S., a program called Operation Warp Speed aims to have 300 million doses on hand by January. Under Brazil's agreement with Sinovac, the Instituto Butantan will learn to produce the Chinese shot.
AP journalist Marcelo Silva de Sousa contributed to this report.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
One plan for an efficacy trial that compares several COVID-19 vaccines calls for using mobile teams, rather than fixed sites, as was done in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with an experimental Ebola vaccine.
By Jon CohenJun. 12, 2020 , 1:35 PM
Sciences COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center.
A Chinese company will turn to Brazil for help. The World Health Organization (WHO) is adopting a strategy forged in a war zone during an Ebola outbreak. And the Trump administration plans to lean on existing U.S. infrastructure for tackling HIV and flu. These are some of the disparate strategies about to be employed in the next and most important stage of the COVID-19 vaccine race: the large-scale, placebo-controlled human trials needed to prove which of the more than135 candidatesare safe and effective.
Two such efficacy trials plan to start next month, even as the United States and global initiatives struggle to answer major questions, from what it means for a COVID-19 vaccine to work to how to find enough people exposed to the virus so a candidate can be put to a real-world test. Populations that have high levels of viral transmission are a moving targetWuhan, China; Seattle; or Milan might once have been a good place to test the mettle of a vaccine, but no longer. And quickly enrolling tens of thousands of properly informed people who meet a trials entry criteria is a big lift, says Susan Buchbinder, an epidemiologist at the San Francisco Department of Public Health who runs vaccine trials.
Competition among trial efforts could hinder the global push, says Wayne Koff, who heads the nonprofit Human Vaccines Project and formerly led the HIV vaccine program at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Its absolutely extraordinary how much has been done in 6 months, but theres an old adage that everybody loves to collaborate unless they want to win. Others, however, dont anticipate conflicts, noting that scientists and officials are sharing information about trial designs and plans. Each one will contribute differently, says Ana Maria Henao Restrepo, the lead representative of WHOs vaccine effort, Solidarity. I dont see competition.
Winning, one of U.S. President Donald Trumps favorite terms, is the clear goal of Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. project that aims to start to vaccinate millions of Americans in October and offer shots to 300 million people in the United States by January 2021. After winnowing down vaccine candidates in an opaque process over the past month and committing what could be more than $2 billion to its top choices, Warp Speed plans to enter three to five of them into efficacy trials that will have harmonized protocols to streamline oversight and will run analyses in central labs so data can more easily be compared.
The first Warp Speed candidate to launch is Modernas vaccine, composed of messenger RNA encoding the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The candidates efficacy trial, announced by the company on 11 June, will enroll 30,000 people and take place primarily at U.S. hospitals and universities long used for HIV and flu vaccine testing and now overseen by Warp Speeds COVID-19 Prevention Network. But which of those brick-and-mortar sites will have enough SARS-CoV-2 circulating near them to quickly produce an efficacy signal is uncertain given the shifting distribution of new cases in the United States.
China has an even starker problem: Theres currently no transmission to speak of in the country, which has forced Sinovac Biotech, a company based in Beijing, to stage efficacy trials of its vaccine candidate in Brazil, where the COVID-19 epidemic is now raging. With a product composed of the entire virus that the company has inactivated with chemicals, Sinovac announced this week it is collaborating with the Butantan Institute, a major research institution in So Paulo that manufactures vaccines. We are working very hard to start the trial in July, says Sinovac Senior Director Meng Weining.
WHO proposes a different solution for Solidaritys efficacy trials. The agency hasnt yet announced which candidates Solidarity will test, but, unlike Warp Speedwhich wont consider Chinese-made vaccinesit is open to products from every country and has made public detailed criteria for how it will prioritize vaccines. To cope with the patchiness of the pandemic, Solidarity will adopt a strategy Henao Restrepo helped develop for Ebola vaccine trials in Guinea in 2015 and, 3 years later, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC): setting up vaccination teams that can quickly mobilize to localized outbreaks.
We did this in Congo despite the war, Henao Restrepo says. Its not the traditional way, and some people think that we are crazy, but we have done it not once but twice. In the DRC, about 20 teams with 15 members each drove around the affected regions and set up temporary sites, vaccinating and following more than 300,000 people.
Warp Speed, which could if needed expand its trials to international sites used for HIV drug and vaccine testing, also plans to form surge clinics to quickly recruit people in rural U.S. areas with big outbreaks or industrial pockets of high transmission such as meat-packing plants. Models driven by machine learning will help Warp Speed forecast where infection will be highest, says Peter Gilbert, a University of Washington, Seattle, biostatistician. There are risk predictors that account for space and geography and features that are more constant like race, ethnicity or preexisting conditions, Gilbert says. Its really complicated.
One of the trickiest issues for trial designers is deciding what, exactly, represents success for a COVID-19 vaccine. Is it an infection endpoint, a transmission endpoint, preventing moderate disease, or preventing severe disease? Koff asks.
There was a lot of debate on that question, for Warp Speed, notes John Mascola, who heads NIAIDs Vaccine Research Center and contributes to the project. A COVID-19 vaccine that fails to prevent infection might still provide great benefit if it reduces symptomatic disease, so Warp Speed and Solidarity both ultimately chose that as the primary endpoint of the trials. Trial volunteers who develop fever, headache, dry cough, or other symptoms linked to COVID-19 will be tested for SARS-CoV-2, to see whether more people with confirmed infections develop symptomatic disease in the placebo arm of the trial than among those who received the vaccine.
To detect an efficacy signal, both Warp Speed and Solidarity estimate they will need to give each vaccine to 15,000 to 20,000 people in a population that has a 1% incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection. If the vaccine prevents COVID-19 symptoms at least 50% of the time, its efficacy should be clear in 6 months, after about 150 infections have accumulated in the trial.
Both efforts will pit multiple vaccine candidates head to head. One difference is that Solidarity plans to compare all its vaccines against a shared placebo group, an approach that reduces the number of volunteers the researchers need to recruit and follow. In the Solidarity trial, the philosophy is we have to make this thing really simple, says Gilbert, who has worked with this effort, too. Solidarity trial sites have the option to do substudies of more detailed questions, but those are built into Warp Speeds trials. Specifically, Warp Speed will do repeated blood draws and nasal/throat swabs to evaluate immune responses and viral levels to better understand why vaccines succeed or how they might affect transmission.
In addition to Solidarity, WHO is helping the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, another global effort that may stage its own vaccine efficacy trials if companies do not want to participate in Solidarity. Companies may or may not be very enthusiastic about head-to-head comparisons, explains Soumya Swaminathan, WHOs chief scientist and top liaison to the ACT Accelerator. And the ACT Accelerator has pockets as deep as Warp Speed: Countries and philanthropies in May pledged $8 billion, with a commitment that it would equitably distribute any proven COVID-19 productsvaccines, treatments, diagnosticsto rich and poor alike.
Buchbinder is impressed by the speed at which these massive efforts have gotten underway. Its unlike any other research Ive undertaken, she says. But she and others are careful to temper expectations. Even though she will oversee a Warp Speed trial site, for example, she doubts the U.S. effort will meet Trumps goal of having a proven vaccine by October. Koff agrees; the failures of so many HIV vaccine trials have sobered him, he says. We need to be really careful how we manage expectations, he concludes.
You can count the R&D execs at AbbVie among the believers in Genmabs bispecific platform tech.
Moving beyond the Allergan buyout, AbbVie refocused on its cancer drug pipeline, shelling out $750 million in cash and promising up to $3.15 billion more in milestones 60% for development and regulatory goals to ally itself on a slate of 7 development and discovery programs.
At the front of the queue is the early-stage drug epcoritamab, a CD3xCD20 bispecific from its DuoBody collection. Theres also DuoHexaBody-CD37 and DuoBody-CD3x5T4. And then AbbVie gets to pick and choose from among the discovery work at Genmab for 4 more, with AbbVie adding in its own contributions in the pairing up to come.
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Thats the beauty of these DNA vaccines, said Wolfgang W. Leitner, the chief of the innate immunity section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. They are simple and fast in terms of development.
Nor are vaccine scientists concerned about the supposed secret sauce. In fact, its quite the opposite: They are skeptical precisely because the technology behind DNA vaccines has been around for decades and has been applied toward so many infectious diseases H.I.V., the flu, malaria yet none of the vaccines have made it to market.
They believe that this approach is capable of producing immunity. Already, DNA vaccines have been licensed for use in pigs, dogs and poultry. But the big if, according to Dr. Dennis M. Klinman, a vaccine scientist who worked at the Food and Drug Administration for 18 years, is whether one will ever be able to generate strong enough an immune response in humans.
Even though Ms. Wiley had read the packet on the science of it all, the next step felt like entering uncharted territory.
Shortly after the initial injection, a nurse handed Dr. Ervin a device resembling an electric toothbrush. He pressed the head which contains three tiny needles instead of bristles over the raised skin on her arm, where shed just had a shot. Then he zapped her.
It was not painful, but its unlike anything Ive ever experienced, Ms. Wiley said.
The carefully calibrated electrical pulses basically steer the DNA into the cells by briefly opening up pores in their membrane, according to David B. Weiner, the director of the vaccine and immunotherapy center at the Wistar Institute and an adviser to Inovio.
Although it may sound fantastical, the technology, called electroporation, dates to the 1980s, when a similar approach was first used to make transgenic plants, according to Dr. Leitner.
The U.S. government will fund and conduct key studies on three experimental coronavirus vaccines, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, tells CNN.Phase 3 trials, which typically involve tens of thousands of people and measure whether a vaccine is safe and effective, will begin with one by Moderna in July, then an Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in August and one by Johnson & Johnson in September.The funding and trial timing were first reported by the Wall Street Journal. CNN has reached out to the companies for comment."The coronavirus vaccine effort is progressing very well and we expect more than one candidate vaccine to be in advanced clinical testing by early summer," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN. "This is good news for the overall coronavirus vaccine effort."Each Phase 3 trial is expected to take place at more than 50 sites, mostly in the United States, but possibly in other countries, too. The trials, which are expected to include about 30,000 people, will begin only after there's enough evidence of safety and efficacy from earlier trial stages.The U.S. government might also plan Phase 3 trials for additional coronavirus vaccines currently in development. According to the World Health Organization, there are 10 vaccines currently in human trials and 126 more in development.Fauci said the funding decision came from the Department of Health and Human Services, in consultation with the National Institute of Health and other agencies. He also said that the testing plans still track with the timeline that he has suggested in the past: a vaccine at scale by the end of the year or early next year.Last week, Fauci said the U.S. should have 100 million doses of one candidate coronavirus vaccine by the beginning of 2021, but many doctors caution that is an ambitious goal. He has also said there will be "more than one winner" in the COVID-19 vaccine field on Tuesday.The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. is nearing two million, and more than 112,000 Americans have died.
The U.S. government will fund and conduct key studies on three experimental coronavirus vaccines, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, tells CNN.
Phase 3 trials, which typically involve tens of thousands of people and measure whether a vaccine is safe and effective, will begin with one by Moderna in July, then an Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in August and one by Johnson & Johnson in September.
The funding and trial timing were first reported by the Wall Street Journal. CNN has reached out to the companies for comment.
"The coronavirus vaccine effort is progressing very well and we expect more than one candidate vaccine to be in advanced clinical testing by early summer," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN. "This is good news for the overall coronavirus vaccine effort."
Each Phase 3 trial is expected to take place at more than 50 sites, mostly in the United States, but possibly in other countries, too. The trials, which are expected to include about 30,000 people, will begin only after there's enough evidence of safety and efficacy from earlier trial stages.
The U.S. government might also plan Phase 3 trials for additional coronavirus vaccines currently in development. According to the World Health Organization, there are 10 vaccines currently in human trials and 126 more in development.
Fauci said the funding decision came from the Department of Health and Human Services, in consultation with the National Institute of Health and other agencies. He also said that the testing plans still track with the timeline that he has suggested in the past: a vaccine at scale by the end of the year or early next year.
Last week, Fauci said the U.S. should have 100 million doses of one candidate coronavirus vaccine by the beginning of 2021, but many doctors caution that is an ambitious goal. He has also said there will be "more than one winner" in the COVID-19 vaccine field on Tuesday.
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. is nearing two million, and more than 112,000 Americans have died.
