President Trump announced Friday that he has enlisted the help of some of America’s biggest companies to contain the spread of coronavirus in the United States, in an “all-of-America” approach.
The corporations include Walmart, Walgreens, Target, CVS, and other major companies.
Trump introduced and thanked the companies’ leaders individually during a press conference in the White House Rose Garden.
“They are simply celebrities in their own right. They’re the biggest business people, the greatest retailers anywhere in the world,” he said.
Doug McMillon from Walmart said the White House has asked them to make portions of their parking lots available in select locations so that people can do drive-through testing for coronavirus.
“When we got the call yesterday from the White House, we were eager to do our part to help serve the country. And given what we are facing, that’s certainly important to do. We should all be doing that,” McMillon said.
Richard Ashworth from Walgreens is ready to engage and help. He said:
We are happy to stand in here and help in communities all across America because a lot of times when we have natural disasters, our stores are a beacon in the community and the situation is no differen. So we look forward to partnering with the CDC, the administration, HHS and the task force and specifically to the Vice President doing such a fantastic job.
Brian Cornell from Target said the company is committed to keeping its stores open to serve American consumers who are stocking up on household essentials and key food and beverage items. He said:
Along with our colleagues from Walmart and Walgreens and our partners at CVS, normally the you’d view us as competitors, but today, we’re focused on a common competitor, and that’s defeating the spread of the coronavirus. We look forward to working with the administration to do our fair share to alleviate this growing threat.
Tom Polen from Becton Dickinson, one of the leading providers of medical devices as well as collection products for testing of coronavirus, said the company is ramping up its manufacturing capacity to “ensure that the right collection devices and testing equipment are ready to address this issue.”
Stephen Rusckowski from Quest Diagnostics said the company is working with other companies, the FDA, and the CDC, and is “up and running” with testing in a number of facilities. He said:
As the President mentioned we now have capabilities from Roche Diagnostics that we will bring into our facilities this weekend and I know myself, my colleagues at LabCorp will be doing the same so the capacity of available to the American public to support this action with consumers will be considerably increased in the next few weeks.
Matt Sause from Roche Diagnostics thanked the FDA for their rapid approval of their coronavirus test. He said:
We really appreciate the partnership with the CDC and the FDA to get that to market as fast as possible because it is critical for us to make that available to help patients in need and working with laboratories to get it up and going in the near future which will bring hundreds of thousands of test available to patients in need in the United States.
David Pierre from Signify Health, the largest house care provider in the U.S., it would go to the homes of the most vulnerable elderly and through its network “stand ready to help and provide our clinicians to be where they are needed whether they are in retail clinics or in the home and we are here to assist.”
Adam Schechter from LabCorp said the company is “working every second of every day” to increase the number of tests that can be run. He said:
We are working with academic medical centers with our colleagues at Qwest with other hospital and other laboratories to ensure that we do everything we can to increase the testing as we move forward and I can tell you we understand how important the testing is and we are committed to doing everything possible.
Thomas Moriarty from CVS said the company is “committed to working with the administration and local public health officials to make this work as well.”
Bruce Greenstein from the LHC Group said the company would work to test Americans who cannot get to a test site in their homes. He said:
We are very proud to be part of the equation for testing in their own home. For Americans that can’t get to a test site or live in rural areas far away from a retail establishment we are here to help and to partner with our hospitals and physicians as well as the people we have here today that will be doing testing around the country.
Vice President Mike Pence also hailed these companies for stepping up and working on combating the coronavirus:
These are companies that are synonymous with communities large and small where people come together and now they are going to come together to meet the needs of the American public.
These commercial laboratories, LabCorp and Quest and Roche have just done an incredible job stepping forward and they are going to literally make — literally make hundreds of thousands of test available and being processed with results to patients in the very near future.
“Every American should be proud of this incredible public-private partnership that is going to be speeding the access of testing to millions of Americans in the weeks ahead,” he said. “Together we will get through this, together we will put the health of America first.”
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