If we know a vaccine is 70 or 80 or 90 percent effective, it would be an ethical to hold it back.

That's Montsef Sloey. He's chief advisor of Operation Warp Speed, the federal government's

COVID-19 vaccine program. Sloey is an experienced immunologist. He used to head the vaccine program

at the pharmaceutical giant, Claxosmith Klein, where he led the development of five major

new vaccines, including ones for Ebola and cervical cancer. Back in May, he was tapped to lead the

White House's effort to develop a coronavirus vaccine. He doesn't do a lot of interviews, but he

sat down with me to talk about this high stakes race for a vaccine, and how close he thinks we

really might be to some sort of breakthrough. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent,

and this is coronavirus, fact versus fiction.

We talk about an emergency use authorization, EUA. Now, if you read the criteria for EUA,

they say that there should be no acceptable alternative to the existing thing that's being

authorized. But for a vaccine, it seems that there is an acceptable alternative. No doctor,

I mean, the acceptable alternative would be that people would wear masks and physically distance.

That's worked in many places around the world. Why rush this? Why not wait? Make sure even for a

few months, there's no other unusual side effects from a safety standpoint, and just encourage people

to mask and distance, which we're not seeing in this country still. I don't think it's working at

the level that I would expect a vaccine to work. And the reality of life here and everywhere else,

in the countries that had various levels of transmission and control is we are unable to control

this pandemic. And we know that vaccines have changed our life expectancy from 40 years to 83 or

86 years in a period of a hundred years, because they are truly effective in the long term

against Patelgen. I would never accept that a vaccine that is unsafe being introduced.

So I would frankly turn the question the other way around and say, what would be my ethical reason

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