NIH head: Coronavirus 'good candidate' for vaccine

Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, says that the coronavirus is a "good candidate" for medical researchers to accomplish finding a vaccine.

"If I had to pick a disease or a virus for which vaccine ought to work. This is not a bad one," he said.

A physician-geneticist and head of the largest biomedical research institution in the world, Dr. Collins said in an interview Friday with the Economic Club of Washington, DC that "that's why we're pulling out every possible stop, trying every approach, different vaccine platforms, different companies, and pulling all of the resources together so that we can run the trials as quickly as possible, but safely."

Dr. Collins spoke during the virtual event from his home in Maryland.

While the NIH is funding several promising candidates for coronavirus vaccines, Dr. Collins says that the federal government is working with a biotechnology company, Moderna that has shown success in a vaccine that is ready to go into a Phase One trial as early as July.

Dr. Collins says that while the federal government is providing funding for some of these efforts to find a vaccine the partnerships with private companies could pose questions about intellectual property, ownership and the pricing of vaccines.

He believes any new treatments that are developed under that partnership in the race for a vaccine will be provided at a "fair price" once they are approved for the public.

"What we want to try to do, though, is we provide additional funds for the trials to be run and for the at risk manufacturing to be done to be sure that those arrangements are made so that there will be a fair price for that vaccine when it comes out the other end," he said.

Dr. Collins is noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project. During his interview he discussed the origins of COVID-19 and denounced speculations that it was man-made, engineered in a lab and deliberately released.

"There is no way that this particular virus could have been human designed," he said. "This is nature's bioterrorist act."

Dr. Collins was appointed to head the NIH by Barack Obama in 2009 and was appointed by President Donald Trump to continue to serve as the NIH Director. He is the longest-serving director since the job became a presidential appointment.