President Donald Trump calls the US government's deal with Pfizer and BioNTech “a historic agreement,” which will distribute coronavirus vaccine across the country.
“Hopefully the approval process will go very quickly, and we think we have a winner there. We also think we have other companies right behind that are doing very well on the vaccines, long ahead of schedule,” Trump said during a press briefing at the White House on Wednesday.
BioNTech and Pfizer announced that the $1.95 billion deal will provide the US 100 million doses of their potential vaccine once it has been proven safe and effective. The companies are currently developing four Covid-19 vaccine.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, the US can purchase 500 million additional doses. The deal was considered the biggest so far to ensure the country its supply of coronavirus vaccine doses.
“This is another crucial step and our effort to develop, manufacture and distribute a vaccine in record-breaking time, really a very small fraction of the time based on previous schedules,” Trump noted.
Pfizer will start distributing doses to locations across the US based on the government’s direction. The companies said before they plan to start a massive trial with up to 30,000 participants later this month.
Trump also said his administration was working with the states for the supply of Gilead Sciences’ antiviral drug remdesivir for hospitals. Remdesivir has been proven effective in treating severely ill coronavirus patients.
The president noted that the US was doing “tremendously well” on therapeutic research and in developing Covid-19 vaccines.
“We’ll see what happens but that would be great, if we could just go into the hospital and just cure people and we’re at a position where we’re actually able to a certain extent with what we have right now and we think in a very short period of time we’ll be able to do that,” he noted.
Trump’s remarks come as the US faces a surge in coronavirus cases in recent weeks, especially in the Sun Belt region. He said that officials are “monitoring and aggressively acting to control the infection in Texas, Arizona, California, Florida.”
Trump presented several causes of the rise in Covid-19 infections. According to him, protests over the murder of George Floyd, “presumably triggered a broader relaxation” of health protocols, a significant increase in travel, and crowds on beaches and bars.
Moreover, the president said Mexico may contribute to the rise in coronavirus cases, saying the US shares a 2,000-mile border with the country where “cases are surging very sharply,” he said.
Trump's coronavirus strategy
Trump previously said that the US is “in the process of developing a strategy” for managing the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’ve learned so much about this disease and we know who the vulnerable are, and we are going to indeed shield them,” Trump said during the White House briefing.
The virus “is a vicious and dangerous illness, but we’ve learned a great deal about it and who it targets,” he stressed.
“We are in the process of developing a strategy that’s going to be very, very powerful. We’ve developed as we go along,” he noted. “Some areas of our country are doing very well, others are doing less well.”
