Report: Trump Administration Picks 5 Coronavirus Vaccine Candidates to Support
The Trump administration has picked five COVID-19 vaccine candidates that it views as the most likely to be successful, according to an article published Wednesday by The New York Times. The newspaper stated that four of the companies whose candidates made the list are U.S.-based: Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA), Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), Merck (NYSE: MRK), and Pfizer (NYSE: PFE). The other is U.K.-headquartered AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN), which is partnering with the University of Oxford. Pfizer is also partnering with Germany-based BioNTech (NASDAQ: BNTX). More than 100 organizations and companies are currently working on vaccines to prevent COVID-19.
The selection of these finalists is part of the administration's Operation Warp Speed, an initiative to rapidly develop a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. President Trump announced this effort on May 15, referring to it as a "massive scientific, industrial, and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project."
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Source Fool.com