US President Donald Trump has said the country will reopen for business, ‘vaccine or no vaccine’.

He insisted the US would have a vaccine by the end of the year and even likened the search for the treatment, code named Operation Warp Speed, to the undertaking to produce the first nuclear weapons in World War Two.

He said: "That means big and it means fast. A massive scientific, industrial and logistical endeavour unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project.

"I don't want people to think this is all dependent on a vaccine. Vaccine or no vaccine, we're back. And we're starting the process.

"In many cases they don't have vaccines and a virus or a flu comes and you fight through it. Other things have never had a vaccine and they go away."

Trump named Moncef Slaoui, a former healthcare executive, and Gustave Perna, an army general, as the two leads on the vaccine project.

Slaoui said he was ‘confident a few hundred million doses of a vaccine' would be available by the end of the year.

And speaking to the New York Times in an earlier interview, he said he wouldn't have signed onto the project ‘unless I thought it was achievable’.

As part of reopening the country, Trump has been keen to get children back to school and he reiterated the point at the briefing.

He said: “I think the schools should be back in the fall."

Earlier this week Dr Anthony Fauci, a medical expert involved in the US coronavirus taskforce, told the Senate it would be a ‘bridge too far’ to reopen schools in the autumn.

And all of this comes as the US now have 1.48 million confirmed cases and 88,507 deaths.