Vice President Mike Pence detailed the administration’s role in developing a vaccine for the Chinese coronavirus, an undertaking it began in February, saying on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily that he believes the country will have a vaccine “before the end of this year.”
Pence, chairman of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, detailed the Trump administration’s strategic moves from the start of the pandemic — from restricting travel from China in January to working on a vaccine in February.
“On Monday, one company known as Moderna went into Phase 3 clinical trials for the first coronavirus vaccine in the United States. Others were quick to follow that,” Pence told Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief and Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow.
President Trump, Pence said, “has never hesitated to move swiftly and decisively to put the health of America first.” He cited Trump taking the “unprecedented step of suspending all travel from China” prior to any cases of community transmission, as well as the administration’s moves to increase availability of personal protective equipment (PPE), add ventilators to the strategic stockpile, and reinvent testing in the country.
“Now, nearly 60 million tests have been performed, virtually from a standing start four months ago on an old system,” Pence said.
“All of that is just a precursor to what this president has done in the development of therapeutics and vaccines. Literally within days in February of when the NIH first received the genetic coding for the coronavirus, we went to work on a vaccine,” the vice president said. “In 62 days, the first clinical trials were initiated.”
“What I’ve been told is that is an unprecedented pace,” he continued. “Usually, vaccines literally take years and years and years to develop. But what the president said was, we’re literally going to move at warp speed without compromising safety, and we created a program where now you have half a dozen companies with very promising vaccines that we’re actually paying, Alex, to produce the vaccine as we complete the testing so the very moment that a vaccine proves to be safe and effective — no corners cut, we’re going to do it exactly by the book through the FDA — we’ll literally have tens of millions of doses available for the American people. And that’s the speed and the urgency the president has put behind this.”
The administration’s role in the development and speed of therapeutics and vaccines serves as another example of “how this president has brought the full weight for the federal government — frankly the full weight of the American economy — behind our response,” Pence said.
In all, the White House Coronavirus Task Force chairman predicted that the country could have a viable vaccine before the year’s end.
“We’re going to keep driving relentlessly to have a safe and effective vaccine,” Pence said. “I hope, and I believe, before the end of this year.”
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. EST.