Trump's baffling coronavirus vaccine event
Source: Washington Post
Trump’s baffling coronavirus vaccine event
By Aaron Blake
3/3/2020, 10:17:35 a.m.
As a private citizen and presidential candidate, Donald Trump was a proponent of vaccine skepticism — ignoring the scientific consensus on stuff like how vaccines don’t cause autism. As president, he is now surrounded by experts on the subject, including on Monday when he held a coronavirus roundtable with his task force and the heads of several pharmaceutical companies.
Yet despite the increasingly scary situation involving the disease and preparations having been underway for weeks, he still appears rather clueless on the subject.
At the event Monday, Trump peppered the drug companies with questions that were some variant of “How fast can you get it done?” But despite this having been a focal point in recent weeks, he still didn’t seem to process the fact that producing a vaccine means conducting months and months of trials before it can be deployed. He even at one point asked whether the flu vaccine could be used to combat coronavirus.
After Leonard Schleifer, the founder and chief executive of Regeneron, said his company aimed to have 200,000 doses ready by August, Trump asked him, “That means you’d be able to use the vaccine that early?” He added, “So that process would be faster than John’s?” referring to another CEO.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/03/trumps-baffling-coronavirus-vaccine-event/
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