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‘Operation Warp Speed made Pfizer vaccine possible’: US president Donald Trump
He said that his administration made it possible to develop a treatment ‘ahead of schedule’ and compared to that any other administration would take ‘four or five years’ to do the same.
US President Donald Trump on Friday said that Operation Warp Speed made it possible for Pfizer to develop its coronavirus vaccine in partnership with BioNTech while addressing the press at the White House. Operation Warp Speed a joint partnership program between several drugmakers, US Defence Department and the US Health and Human Services to help speed up the research, development, production and manufacturing of vaccines to stop the spread of coronavirus.
‘It’s been an incredible effort. As a result of Operation Warp Speed, Pfizer announced on Monday that it’s China virus vaccine is more than 90% effective,” said Donald Trump who was accompanied by the chief adviser for the Defense Department’s Project Warp Speed Moncef Slaoui and vice president Mike Pence. This is the first time the US president has spoken publicly after his defeat in the US presidential election.
“In July my administration reached an agreement with Pfizer to provide $1.95 billion to support the manufacturing and distribution of 100 million doses… Our investment will allow citizens access to the vaccine made by Pfizer free of charge. Pfizer said that they are not a part of Operation Warp Speed but it turned out to be an unfortunate misrepresentation. They are a part of it, that’s why we gave them $1.95 billion,” he further added.
He said that his administration made it possible to develop a treatment ‘ahead of schedule’ and compared to that any other administration would take ‘four or five years’ to do the same. Trump also said that his administration is working to secure an emergency use authorization following which distribution process will be charted out. He said it is a ‘matter of a few weeks’ till they figure out the distribution process.
Frontline workers, elderly population and high-risk individuals will be inoculated in the beginning, said the US president.
Trump also said that there will be no lockdown and cited that it results in loss of livelihoods. He said, “This administration will not go into a lockdown. It leads to depression, job losses, loss of livelihoods and costs lives.”
He further said, “Hopefully whatever happens in the future, who knows, which administration it will be, I guess time will tell, but I can tell you this administration will not go to a lockdown.”
Trump also praised his own administration for the handling of the pandemic and said that it is doing better than most of its ‘peer countries’. He also said that the US continues to test in large numbers and has a low case fatality rate.
US has recorded more than 11,000,000 cases so far and its death toll is now close to 250,000. It has recorded more than 100,000 cases for the last two days in a row.
Praising his handling of the US economy, Trump said, “We reduced unemployment by half and we have doubled our growth. This is rapid recovery when compared to other Western nations. We went down less, went up more.”
Trump also took a jibe at New York governor Andrew Cuomo who has earlier said that his administration will set up a team which will review the vaccine and recently lamented that the Trump administration will be in charge of vaccine distribution. Trump said that Cuomo is doing the wrong thing from the perspective of public health and accused him of politicising the situation.
He said, “New York does not trust the vaccine. It pains me. Cuomo has to let us know when they are ready.” Trump also said that they are ready to roll out the vaccines for New York as soon they let the government know that they are ready.
