Coronavirus US: Donald Trump clashes with health chief Robert Redfield over vaccine

Donald Trump insists Americans will be given the vaccine on a ‘vast’ scale as soon as it became available later this year.

Donald Trump has contradicted health officials over the vaccine’s availability. Picture: AFP.

Donald Trump has clashed publicly with his chief health official after he said most Americans would not be vaccinated against the coronavirus until at least the middle of next year.

The president used a press conference at the White House to claim instead that ordinary Americans would be given the vaccine on a “vast” scale from the moment it became available in either October or November.

The issue of when a vaccination becomes widely available is a key issue in the election campaign, with Mr Trump trying to convince voters that they will be protected from the killer virus sooner rather than later.

He was speaking only hours after Dr Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a Senate hearing that the vaccine would be distributed on a strict priority scale with only a “very limited supply” before the end of this year.

For it to be “fully available to the American public, so we begin to take advantage of a vaccine to get back to our regular life,” he said, “I think we are probably looking at late second quarter, third quarter 2021.”

Mr Trump strongly disputed Dr Redfield’s claim and later called him up to challenge him. “I think he made a mistake when he said that. It’s just incorrect information,’ Mr Trump told the press conference. “I believe he was confused.

“Under no circumstance will it be as late as the doctor said.

“To the general public immediately, when we go, we go. We’re not looking to say, gee, in six months we’ll start giving it to the general public. No, we want to go immediately,” he said.

“I called him and I said, ‘What did you mean by that?’ And I think he just made a mistake. We are ready to distribute immediately to a vast section of our country … distribution will be very rapid. We are focused on high risk but we are also focused on the general public very much.”

It is the latest example of public clashes between Mr Trump and his health experts on the pandemic.

Despite the president’s comments, health experts say it would be impossible to distribute a vaccine to an entire country of 328 million people at once. Current planning is for the first vaccine doses to be given to health care workers and first responders and then to the most vulnerable which includes senior citizens in nursing homes and those with chronic underlying health conditions.

Only then would vaccines become available to the general population. The question in dispute is how long this would take to reach the general population.

Mr Trump also challenged a claim by Dr Redfield that because of the long lag between the approval of a vaccine and its effect in controlling the pandemic, face-masks would be more important than a vaccine.

“I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against Covid than when I take a Covid vaccine,” because the vaccine is unlikely to produce the desired immune response in everyone who gets it, Dr Redfield said.

But Mr Trump disputed this, saying ‘“No, (a) vaccine is much more effective than the masks.”

Despite accusing Dr Redfield of making a ‘mistake’ and being ‘confused’ about the timeline for the vaccine distribution Mr Trump declined to say he had lost confidence in the CDC chief.

Mr Trump’s Democrat opponent Joe Biden accused the president of playing politics with a potential vaccine saying he was trying to rush out a vaccine for political gain.

“Let me be clear, I trust vaccines. I trust scientists,” Mr Biden said. “But I don’t trust Donald Trump, and at this moment, the American people can’t either.

“Scientific breakthroughs don’t care about calendars any more than the virus does,” he said. “They certainly don’t adhere to election cycles. And their timing and their approval and their distribution should never, ever be distorted by political considerations. It should be determined by science and safety alone.”

The White House is hoping that a coronavirus vaccine is approved for use before the election on 3 November, potentially boosting Mr Trump’s chances of re-election.

The pandemic remains the president’s greatest political challenge with one in three Americans disapproving of his handling of the crisis.

(Cameron Stewart is also US Contributor for Sky News Australia)