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| AP Photo/Evan Vucci |
As some states loosen lockdown restrictions in a bid to set the nation's battered economy on the road to recovery, President Trump endorsed a state-by-state approach while predicting at a Fox News virtual town hall on Sunday that a coronavirus vaccine could be available by December.
"I think we'll have a vaccine by the end of the year," Trump told the moderators, Fox News' Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, saying he was "very confident" in the assessment. "We'll have a vaccine much sooner rather than later."
Asked by MacCallum if he was concerned about the potential risks of accelerating a vaccine and human trials, Trump responded: "No, because they're volunteers. They know what they're getting into ... They want to help the process."
That timeline was dramatically ahead of previous estimates from both public and private sector experts at the outset of the pandemic, which had said a vaccine could take up to 18 months, if not longer. But, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said this weekend it was "doable if things fall in the right place" to have a vaccine by January.
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| AP Photo/Evan Vucci |
Trump also predicted that the U.S. would be self-reliant on antibiotics, without needing to rely on China, within two years. Republicans have said it's "crazy" that America is reliant on China, a communist adversary, for critical supplies including antibiotics.
However, Trump predicted that as many as 100,000 Americans could die from the coronavirus, in a significant increase from his estimate of 60,000 last month. “We’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people,” Trump said, calling it a "horrible" situation. Without his administration's actions, Trump asserted, "the minimum we would have lost was a million two, a million four, a million five, that’s the minimum."
Trump generally backed the efforts of America's governors to manage the crisis, saying that each state will have a different approach to reopening their economies.
"It's going to pass," he assured, repeatedly referring to the outbreak as the "plague."Read the rest of the story HERE and follow links below to related stories and resources:
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