49% in US favor vaccination

Nearly half of Americans said they would be willing to get vaccinated for novel the coronavirus, while another half are skeptical, a new survey found Wednesday, as a top health official predicted such products are on track for the end of 2020.

"If a vaccine against coronavirus becomes available to the public, 49 percent say they plan to get vaccinated, and 20 percent say they will not. Another 31 percent are not sure," said a statement from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which based its survey on interviews with 1,056 adults across the US.

The percentage of people willing to get the shots against COVID-19 is even three percentage points lower than those who planned to get vaccinated against the flu, as found in a 2019 survey conducted for the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.

Safety concerns seemed to have kept the numbers low. Among the 1 in 5 Americans who would decline the coronavirus vaccine, 70 percent said they worried about side effects from the shots, while 42 percent feared getting infected with the coronavirus from the vaccination.

In contrast, those planning to get the vaccine are doing so primarily to protect themselves and their families.

Asked why would they get a coronavirus vaccine, between 72 percent to 81 percent reported that life won't go back to normal until most people are vaccinated, and that they wanted to protect their community and feel safe around other people, according to the survey release.

The poll also found that nearly 7 in 10 people aged 60 and above say they'd get vaccinated, compared with 40 percent who are younger.

The world is racing against the clock to develop, test and produce COVID-19 vaccines to help stop a pandemic that has infected at least 5.65 million people globally and killed more than 353,400 as of Wednesday.

Worldwide, there are currently 10 vaccines in human clinical trials, and 115 candidate vaccines in preclinical evaluation, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Wednesday in a document "Draft landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines".

Five of the candidate vaccines in clinical evaluation are from China, while four are in the United States and one in Europe, according to the WHO.

As to the time when the vaccines will be ready, most Americans anticipate it by some time in 2021, and 1 in 5 see vaccine being available before the end of the year, according to the survey conducted May 14-18.

There is a possibility that a vaccine for COVID-19 could be ready as early as November, according to Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"We have a good chance — if all the things fall in the right place — that we might have a vaccine that would be deployable by the end of the year, by November-December, Fauci said Wednesday on CNN.

That timeline was echoed by Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, but with caution.

"We might have it available in the fall for emergency use authorization for certain populations, and we'll certainly have the doses by the end of the year," he said in an interview on CNBC Wednesday.

"I just don't think we'll have the data to support widespread inoculation at that point," he said.

Gottlieb said that when a COVID-19 vaccine is ready, one question is whether enough consumers will use it.

"Since 20 percent or more may have been infected by that time, we'd need to get perhaps 40 percent utilization to achieve herd immunity," he tweeted Tuesday.