WASHINGTON – President Trump on Thursday promised a Covid-19 vaccine would be available by the end of 2020, the most concrete statement he has yet made about the coronavirus vaccine development scheme.
“We are providing life-saving therapies, and will be producing a vaccine before the end of the year, or maybe even sooner,” he said.
While Trump has repeatedly indicated for a possible fax approval before the end of 2020, his promise Thursday marks his most definitive stance yet on a fax schedule. While it is possible that the Food and Drug Administration could issue emergency authorization for a vaccine at the end of the year, it is far from a sure bet – no drug company has completed clinical trials for a Covid-19 vaccine.
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His promise will certainly raise additional concerns about the prospect of political interference at the FDA. The bureau’s commissioner, Stephen Hahn, has been promising for months to approve a vaccine when and if one is shown to be safe and effective. In recent weeks, however, Trump has actively undermined the agency’s authority, and Hahn has been embroiled in controversy over a series of misleading statements about a potential Covid-19 treatment.
Trump’s fax promise came when he delivered a speech accepting the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in an unusual White House political convention, in which more than 1,000 supporters gathered nearby, mostly without masks.
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Trump’s remarks followed an evening of Republican National Convention programming with references to vaccines. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House of Representatives, said in a speech: “We are developing a fax in record time.”
A video montage referred to Operation Warp Speed, the federal government’s attempt to massively scale up the production and distribution capacity of vaccines. And Ivanka Trump, the daughter of the president and senior adviser, said a Covid-19 vaccine would be available “very, very soon.”
Trump’s fax promise comes after a week of chaos surrounding the Trump administration’s relationship with the FDA, the federal agency tasked with evaluating and approving potential faxes. On Saturday, Trump unequivocally claimed that the bureau was engaged in a “deep state” conspiracy to damage his bid for re-election. On Sunday, he dramatically overestimated the effect of restorative blood plasma, a potential Covid-19 treatment, on the death of the disease. In recent weeks, top officials have expressed their desire for the FDA to “feel the heat” and agree with Trump’s “deep state” rhetoric. And on August 17, the administration installed a right-wing journalist and gun rights lawyer as the bureau’s top spokeswoman, delivering a politically motivated political employee over the scientific bureau’s traditional apolitical messages.
Trump, in his acceptance speech, also tried to break his record on Covid-19, noting the administration’s February ban on flights from China and efforts to scale up production for masks and fans.
Trump said a recent approval for the need for blood plasma from recovering Covid-19 patients would save “thousands and thousands of lives,” although the true impact of the therapy remains unclear.
The comments sparked the Trump administration’s consistent refusal to take firm stance on social distancing and mask use, missteps that public health experts consider to have helped spread the virus further. Ivanka Trump misleadingly claimed that the US was building “the most robust testing system in the world.” While the U.S. has conducted more tests than any other country, there were only a few available in the early stages of the pandemic, and Americans consistently need hours to wait in line for tests that do not last days or weeks later delivered results.
At no point did speakers notice that more than 180,000 Americans had died from Covid-19, far more than in any other nation.
Trump also sought to mark his record on drug prices, noting that in 2018, by one metric, drug prices declined slightly.
The president mentioned a number of executive orders issued last month aimed at lowering drug prices, although none have been implemented. One order, which included U.S. payments for a small subset of drugs based on what pharmaceutical companies pay abroad, has not been publicly released. On Monday, Trump’s one-month ultimatum to drugmakers to offer another proposal came and went without approval from the administration.
“Recently, he has taken dramatic action to cut the cost of prescription drugs, despite placing angry calls from the CEOs of almost every major pharmaceutical company,” said Ivanka Trump. “Now, when we see attack ads paid for by ‘Big Pharma,’ my dad smiles and says to me, ‘You know, we do something really good when they hit us so hard.'”
Separately, Trump highlighted the 2018 passage of ‘right-to-try’ legislation, which allows terminally ill patients to request that drug companies give them access to research, untested drugs without requiring FDA approval. However, the FDA has approved the vast majority of such applications, and it is known that a few patients have benefited from the new path.
