White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said Sunday he is “hopeful” that the Trump administration will be able to release new information on therapies to treat the new coronavirus “in the coming days.”
Meadows added that the White House has been “working 24 hours” to ensure that the therapeutics and vaccine for COVID-19 are developed and available for use as soon as possible.
“The president has been very clear: any amount of money and any amount of time that needs to be invested, we are doing it,” Meadows said during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.”
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He added: “We are hopeful that with some of the advanced therapeutic technologies we will be able to announce some new therapies in the coming days.”
Meadows also defended Trump’s handling of the public health crisis amid criticism that the president could have done more to stem the spread of the contagion, saying that ultimately the solution to ending the pandemic is not mitigation efforts. .
In fact, we take unprecedented steps. The president not only closed travel from China and Europe long before medical experts suggested we should, and then closed the economy to try to mitigate the damage, “he said.
Meadows added: “We are not going to have a solution for this. They are not masks. It is not shutting down the economy. Hopefully, it’s American ingenuity that will allow therapies and vaccines to finally conquer this. “
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The White House chief of staff’s comments come after a week when Trump admitted that the public health crisis is likely to worsen as cases emerge across the country and called on all Americans to wear masks in public.
“It will get worse before it gets better,” Trump said of the pandemic that has infected about 4 million Americans. “That’s something I don’t like to say, but that’s the way it is.”
As of Sunday, the U.S. has more than 4.1 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 146,000 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
