Trump: Considering Making Vaccine Available Free of Charge

President Donald Trump said on Friday he was looking at possibly making a coronavirus vaccine available free of charge.

"We're looking at that, actually," Trump said when asked by a reporter at the White House whether a vaccine would be free. 

Also on Friday, Trump introduced a former pharmaceutical executive and a four star-general who will lead his crash coronavirus vaccine effort, amid a whistle-blower’s criticism that the administration lacked a plan to combat the outbreak.

Trump named General Gustave Perna, who directs the U.S. Army Materiel Command, as chief operating officer of “Operation Warp Speed,” likening it to the Manhattan Project effort to develop the atomic bomb.

“That means big and that means fast,” Trump said in remarks from the White House Rose Garden.

Former GlaxoSmithKline Plc executive Moncef Slaoui will be the project’s “chief scientist,” Trump said, calling him “one of the most respected men in the world in the production and really the formulation of vaccines.”

“I’d love to see if we could do it before the end of the year,” he said. “It’s risky, it’s expensive, but we’ll be saving massive amounts of time, we’ll be saving years.”

Bloomberg News contributed to this report.