The South Korean solution to the COVID-19 virus (widespread testing and the hydroxychloroquine-zinc cure) is beginning to work in the United States. Americans, like South Koreans, will soon be back at work and school. But at Monday's Coronavirus Task Force press briefing, Dr. Anthony Fauci ignored the success.

Instead, he pretended that the only way the U.S. could get back to normal was through vaccines and new therapies. He was responding to a question directed to him, and him only, by reporter Jonathan Karl at the 37:37 mark of this video:

YouTube screen grab (croppped)

Karl: Will we truly get back to normal before there’s a vaccine available to everybody?...

Fauci: … I believe with the therapies that will be coming online, with the fact that I feel confident that over a period of time we will get a good vaccine, that we will never have to get back to where we are right now. So, if that means getting back to normal, then we’ll get back to normal.

Fauci was being disingenuous. His own organization NIAID (one of the institutes of NIH) is slow walking both therapies and vaccines. For example, NIAID is currently conducting a study on the effectiveness of Remdesivir, a drug which, along with chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, proved effective against COVID-19 in the Chinese test-tube studies. Here's NIAID's schedule for completing Phase 3 of its approval process:

Actual Study Start Date: February 2, 2020

Estimated Primary Completion Date: April 1, 2023

Estimated Study Completion Date: April 1, 2023

Believe it or not, that is not a misprint! Fauci was touting new therapies even while his own organization was slow walking the most promising of them so that it would not be ready until 2023!

The same is true of vaccines. NIAID and NIH as a whole have taken charge over approving vaccines for COVID-19. Two American vaccines have already begun their Phase 1 clinical trials (by Moderna and Inovio Pharmaceuticals), one is set to begin in April (Pfizer/BioNTech), and at least four report that they will be ready for clinical trials within a few months (Novavax, CureVac, University of Pittsburgh and Johnson and Johnson). America's businesses and researchers have done their part to get out a vaccine right away.

Yet Fauci has repeatedly claimed that no vaccine could possibly be approved in less than “a year to a year and a half.” The first time he said this, he was directly contradicting President Trump who expected a vaccine much sooner.

In contrast, after the H1N1 (swine flu) epidemic hit in April 2009, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) expedited approval of vaccines. Five months later, on September 15 2009, four different vaccines were approved. Why should approval take over a year this time but only 5 months in 2009? Apparently, NIH is planning to slow walk the COVID-19 vaccines through the usual approval process, which requires three sequential phases:

Clinical Trials. The clinical trials establish whether the vaccine is safe and whether it creates the antibodies necessary to defend the human body against the disease. Studies. Their purpose is "to identify the vaccine preparation, optimal dose, and schedule" and to "assess the impact of multiple variables on immune response, such as age, ethnicity, gender, and presence of maternal or pre-existing antibodies (in infants)." Field Trials. Their purpose is "to assess the effect of the final formulation. These trials are typically designed to evaluate efficacy and safety. Vaccine Efficacy (VE) is defined as the percent reduction in incidence (of disease or infection) among the vaccinated."

The CDC expedited the vaccine process in 2009 and got it done in just 5 months. But Fauci's NIH is in charge of this one, and Fauci says that it can't be done in less than 12 to 18 months. Fauci is part of the problem, not part of the solution.