US President Donald Trump’s nomination of Moncef Slaoui to head the anti-COVID-19 vaccine program has brought cheers, thousands of miles away in the North African country of Morocco.

Axar.az reports citing Turkish media.

Slaoui, 61, a former professor of immunology at the University of Mons, Belgium was born in Agadir, Morocco. Those close to him said that his sister had died from whooping cough, while they were growing up in the African country bordering the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.

Since then he never looked back. He has spent his career attacking the under-researched diseases that plague the developing world.

“Salaoui already has a cervical-cancer vaccine and a pneumococcal immunization to his credit, and in 2015 he won European approval for the world’s first malaria vaccine, which could limit the spread of a disease that kills more than half a million people a year,” said the New York-based American multinational business magazine Fortune.

Trump has compared his vaccine initiative called Operation Warp Speed, to the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb in the 1940s.