US President Donald Trump said on Friday that the US government was working with other countries to develop a coronavirus vaccine at an accelerated pace while preparing to distribute a vaccine once one is ready.

Speaking at an event in the White House Rose Garden and quoted by Reuters, Trump expressed his hope that a vaccine would be in place before the end of the year and said his administration would mobilize its forces to get a vaccine distributed once one was in place.

Trump said the government would invest in all the top coronavirus vaccine candidates and said a list had been narrowed to 14 promising possibilities with a plan to narrow further.

Former GlaxoSmithKline executive Moncef Slaoui, who Trump has tapped to help spearhead the vaccine effort, expressed optimism that progress would be made before the end of the year.

“I have very recently seen early data from a clinical trial with a coronavirus vaccine. These data made me feel even more confident that we will be able to deliver a few hundred million doses of a vaccine by the end of 2020,” he said.

Slaoui did not mention which vaccine, but one developed by Moderna Therapeutics with help from the National Institutes of Health recently won approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to advance to the next phase of clinical trials.

Trump in his remarks said the world was cooperating to develop a vaccine.

“We’ve got countries that are allies - we have some countries, frankly, that are not allies - where we’re working very closely together,” Trump said. “We have no ego. Whoever gets it, we think it’s great. We’re going to work with them. They’re going to work with us. Likewise, if we get it, we’re going to be working with them.”

At the same time, the President also made clear his view that the country could move on from the epidemic without a vaccine.

“Vaccine or no vaccine, we’re back,” Trump said.

On Thursday, the European Medicines Agency predicted that there could be licensed drugs to treat the new coronavirus in the next few months and that a vaccine might even be approved in early 2021 in a “best-case scenario.

Dr. Marco Cavaleri, who heads the European regulator’s vaccines department, told a media briefing that approving medicines to treat COVID-19 might be possible “before the summer,” citing ongoing clinical trials.

Recent early results for the drug remdesivir suggested it could help patients recover from the coronavirus faster, although longer-term data is still needed to confirm any benefit.

(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)