Some of those obstacles are artificial in nature. Anything a big pharma CEO says in public is not a public service announcement... it's a self-service announcement. You just don't know what his angle is.

That doesn't necessarily make him wrong, but I'd probably look at the big picture... lots of people who also know what they're doing are spending billions, and their goal is certainly somewhere around year-end, because somebody else might eat their lunch if they take too long.

Once a vaccine is approved, by whatever mechanism, governments will be willing to spend many billions to expedite production if the private sector can't go it alone.