“It’s a kind of race, not against other scientists, but against the virus itself,” said Olivier Schwartz, the head of viruses and immunities at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. The institution was the first in Europe to isolate the strains of the coronavirus and sequence its genome after the virus emerged late last year in central China.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIAID), confirmed that a Phase 1 trial of a candidate vaccine would likely begin in early April, in an interview with ABC News.

“Going into a Phase 1 trial does not mean you have a vaccine,” Fauci said. “It means you have taken the first step towards the vaccine, which by anybody’s calculation is going to be at least a year to a year and a half at best, and that is if we proceed under the emergency authorization of the regulatory agencies.”