Trump Presses Drug Industry to Help Contain Coronavirus

At a meeting with drug company chief executives at the White House, Trump said his administration would work to reduce regulatory obstacles for the creation of treatments but was cautioned that even on a fast track, it could take a year to 18 months to come up with a vaccine for wide distribution.

This is a “great challenge,” the president told reporters with the executives gathered around him. “But everyone’s responded very well.”

Trump confirmed that he was considering further limits on travel “from certain countries where they’re having more of a breakout.” The administration has already imposed limits on travel from China, barred all travel to Iran and issued warnings to Americans not to travel to parts of Italy and South Korea.

The president’s comments came as he opened a week in which infections in the United States were expected to grow along with the economic consequences. While playing down the threat of the virus, Trump has scheduled events this week to try to demonstrate that he has a grip on the outbreak, including a visit to the National Institutes of Health on Tuesday and possibly one to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention later in the week.

Vice President Mike Pence, who is coordinating the administration’s response, held a conference call with the nation’s governors to update them and promised to convene similar calls once a week. He later told reporters that four more Americans died as of Monday, bringing the total to six. Altogether, he said, 43 people have been infected while in the United States — 29 of them in California and Washington state — and another 48 infected people were brought into the country or exposed to someone brought into the country.

But while Trump and Pence emphasized the relatively small number of infected people in the United States compared with the population who come down with the flu each year, the secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, cautioned that the outbreak would grow worse.

“We’re going to see more cases,” Azar said.

“We need to be prepared,” he added. “People should not be panicked,” but “there are steps people can take.”

The president may be disappointed in his hope for quick action on a vaccine. The drug company executives told him that it would still take a year to 18 months to produce a viable vaccine in quantities for widespread use.

“That’s going to require testing periods,” Dr. J. Joseph Kim, the chief executive of Inovio Pharmaceuticals, said in an interview after the White House meeting. “Obviously we’re working at warp speed on this. Just think — we didn’t even have coronavirus in our vocabulary until early January.”

Kim said that his company would begin human trials of a vaccine next month, but that it would take until the end of the year or early next year to be ready for the broader public.

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“We can produce as much as 1 million doses by the end of this year using our existing capacity and resources,” he said. “But we need help from the U.S. government and resources it could bring to scale. If we have a successful vaccine, we need to make hundreds of millions of doses.”

But Kim said he was upbeat after the meeting about the prospect of help from the government and collaboration with other drug companies. “I walked away feeling very optimistic about our own work but also our comrades in arms,” he said.

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Democrats remained unimpressed by the Trump administration’s efforts. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate Democratic leader, took to the Senate floor to assail Trump for his handling of the crisis.

“Even now, President Trump seems to be spending more of his time blaming the media, and blaming the Democrats, than being constructive,” Schumer said. “In fact, he blames everyone not named Donald Trump. The president is downplaying — he is downplaying — the threat of coronavirus to a dangerous degree, and his chief of staff, amazingly, said to Americans, ‘Turn off your televisions.’”

Trump’s meetings on the issue came before he flew to Charlotte, North Carolina, for a campaign rally on Monday night. He told reporters before leaving that it remained “very safe” for him and his Democratic opponents to hold such large campaign events even as businesses and nonprofit groups were canceling large conventions.

“Well, these were set up a long time ago and others are,” he said during a morning meeting with reporters in the Oval Office alongside President Iván Duque Márquez of Colombia, who was visiting. “I mean, you could ask that to the Democrats because they’re having a lot of rallies. They’re all having rallies. That’s what they’re doing. They’re campaigning.”

He added, “I think it’s very safe, yeah, I think it’s very safe.”

A number of large conventions have been scrubbed in recent days over fears of the coronavirus. On Sunday, the American Physical Society canceled its international gathering in Denver, scheduled to open on Monday, even after some of the 11,000 expected participants had begun to arrive. Workday turned an internal sales meeting for 3,000 that was supposed to open Monday in Orlando, Florida, into a “virtual experience” event instead. Facebook has scrapped a global marketing meeting in San Francisco scheduled for March and an annual software developer conference in San Jose in May.

“The health and well-being of our meeting attendees, staff, vendors and the Denver community are our primary concern,” Phil Bucksbaum, the president of the physical society, said in announcing its decision. “We recognize and sincerely regret that the timing of this decision has significantly inconvenienced many members of our community.”

At least some of the affected conventions were aimed at bringing people into the country at a time when travel was being restricted between the United States and countries like China and Italy, where the outbreak has been more pronounced. By contrast, the rallies hosted by Trump and his Democratic rivals attract mainly local residents.

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The president told reporters that the government was aggressively combating the spread of the coronavirus. “Working very hard with the CDC, with everybody on a subject that has become a very big subject,” he said. “Our country is doing very well, our professionals are doing really an incredible job.”

While more cases are emerging, Trump noted that overall, it was still “not very many in the United States.”

“We’re talking about a vaccine; maybe a cure, it’s possible,” he said. “So we’ll see about that. But we’re about a vaccine. And they’re moving along very quickly, all of the pharmaceutical companies, are moving along very quickly.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .