Donald Trump Roundtable Transcript on Donating Plasma July 30

Donald Trump: (00:00)
… is to help treat those battling the current infection that we all know so well. Plasma is one of the more delicate ways of doing things. It’s had tremendous response so far we’ve had, and it’s an effort to really accelerate new therapies and further reduce mortality. We’ve been able to show some tremendous things. If you notice today, it was covered very well. A lot of countries where they thought they were doing well, they’re not doing well at all. They’ve had explosions. Explosions, unfortunately. We’re joined by secretary of health and human services who’s doing a terrific job, Alex Azar, Alex, hi Alex. FDA commissioner, Stephen Hahn. Hi, Steve. Surgeon General, Jerome Adams. And I hope your wife is okay, Jerome. I know she had a little difficulty, but I’m sure she’s going to be fine. Right? Please give her my regards. Thank you, Jerome.

Dr. Francis Collins, who everyone knows. Francis, thank you very much. NIH. And Dr. Anthony Fauci. Anthony, hi. And Deborah. Where’s Deborah? Deborah. Hi, Deborah. Good job. Everybody’s doing a good job. Everybody’s working very hard. I want to also thank to the CEO of American Red Cross. Somebody who’s done outstanding work. I’ve known about it for a long time, Gail McGovern. Thank you, Gail. She’s done really an outstanding job too. CEO of America’s Blood Centers, Kate Fry. Hi, Kate. Thank you very much. CEO of CSL Limited, Paul Perreault. Paul, thank you very much. Great job. And CEO of LabCorp, Adam Schechter. Thank you, Adam, very much.

We’ve taken bold actions to give Americans access to plasma therapies. The FDA made the treatment available to patients with life-threatening infections beginning in March. We provided 48 million dollars to the Mayo Clinic to support their expanded access program for plasma. We’re providing up to 270 million dollars to the Red Cross and America’s Blood Centers for the collection of up to 360,000 units of plasma.

My administration is partnering with commercial labs, insurers and healthcare providers to encourage those who have had the virus who donate plasma. So if you’ve had the virus, if you donate, it would be a terrific thing. We really need donations of the plasma. To those that have had the virus, you’ve gotten through it, and I guess that means you have something very special there, right? Yeah. So we would appreciate that. It would help a lot of people. We’re grateful to LabCorp for offering free antibody testing to identify people who can donate. And LabCorp has really been fantastic in a lot of ways, and other ways also.

As a result of these initiatives, we’ve already treated nearly 50,000 patients with plasma. Roughly two million Americans have fully recovered from the virus. This afternoon, I’m asking you the citizens to go to the coronavirus.gov. It’s coronavirus.gov, and volunteered to donate plasma as soon as she can. We have a lot of people that would heal, would get better. Soon as you can, please.

In addition, I’m once again urging to all Americans to protect the elderly, socially distance, wear a mask when you cannot avoid the crowded places. And if you can, you have to avoid crowded places. It just seems like so many things are taking place in crowded places. We don’t want that. And always wash your hands. Wash your hands as often as you can. Together we’ll defeat the virus, we’ll defeat the invisible enemy. I want to thank the American Red Cross. I’ve been a fan of the Red Cross for a long time, as you know, and we appreciate the great work that you do. Thank you very much, Gail. And now I’d like to ask Gail to say a few words, please. Thank you.

Gail McGovern: (04:29)
Mr. President, thank you so much for joining us today and for shining the light on the critical need for convalescent plasma. I’m honored to be seated here with these distinguished top medical experts who are striving to help us deal with this terrible pandemic. And I am so grateful that the American Red Cross can actually play a role in the treatment of COVID-19. We’re helping to collect units of convalescent plasma, which I’ve been told is showing promising results and it’s treating COVID patients. We’ve shipped over 24,000 units so far. And I am in awe of our donors who are donating convalescent plasma. They struggled through this disease, they came through the backend, they have precious antibodies, and hospitals are transfusing their plasma into patients that are struggling mightily with the disease themselves. And it’s a testament to the generosity of the American public.

These donors have recovered from a debilitating disease and they’re willing to lend an arm to help somebody they probably will never even have the opportunity to meet. And in fact, blood donors in general are just so generous. They are helping save someone’s life and they do it without question. And it’s just an amazing, amazing thing. Americans always step up whether it’s a pandemic or a hurricane, and it’s a privilege to be able to see the generosity of the American public over and over again, whether they’re volunteering, donating blood, or even providing us with financial donations. So on behalf of the entire American Red Cross, I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to the people that actually recovered from COVID-19 and are giving this remarkable gift of life to help them recover as well.

And right now the demand for convalescent plasma is exceeding our collections. So we really do need people to come out and donate. In fact, over the past month, the number of orders doubled from our hospitals. So, please, please, please, I know I speak on behalf of Kate as well, consider donating plasma if you had COVID because you are going to do a wonderful thing. It’s easy, it doesn’t take a lot of time, and I can tell you that when you donate blood, you leave our blood center, you feel so great. You just feel so great about yourself because you just saved someone’s life, and not a lot of people can make that claim. So thank you again, Mr. President, and really appreciate the shout-out for convalescence plasma.

Thank you, Gail. Great job.

Thank you.

You’re doing something very special. Thank you.

Thank you.

Alex, please.

Alex Azar: (07:32)
Well, Mr. President, thank you so much for leading the effort now to get people to donate convalescent plasma. This is going to be a major national initiative in the months ahead. And I want to thank the Red Cross and I want to thank America’s blood banks for work that they’re doing to bring our donors in and to get this plasma. For the tens of thousands of people that have already donated plasma, thank you for what you’ve done. You are literally saving lives. And we need hundreds of thousands more to please come forward. If you’ve been infected and recovered, please go to coronavirus.gov or reach out to your American Red Cross outlet or your local blood bank. And please be a donor. We now have more than 48,000 patients that have received convalescent plasma, thanks to the work of American researchers and physicians, the FDA, HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response and groups like the Red Cross and our blood banks.

Alex Azar: (08:36)
This effort is just one piece of what the president’s leading towards bringing therapeutics to the market. So we have remdesivir, we have steroids for lung injury, and now we bring convalescent plasma to people. We’ve invested more than 1.7 billion dollars through our Operation Warp Speed, which is the president’s initiative to get vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics to the American people in record time. And when it comes to therapeutics, warp speed means weeks, not months. Earlier this month through Operation Warp Speed, we announced a 450 million dollar agreement with Regeneron to support their promising monoclonal antibody cocktail.

Alex Azar: (09:16)
What makes OWS so bold is that we’ve now paid to begin making doses of this is of this Regeneron product before it receives FDA authorization or approval. And that means that if, and only if, this drug meets FDA’s gold standard for safety and effectiveness, we’ll have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of doses to distribute to American patients right away, as soon as this fall. And that’s what today is about also, ensuring that even as the FDA reviews the data on convalescent plasma, we have plenty of supply, we have access for people. It also enables us to develop new therapies such as hyperimmune globulin, which is the distilled purified version of our convalescent plasma. So, thanks to everyone who’s donated. And thank you, Mr. President, for this national call to action to donate.

Alex: (10:03)
Mr. President for this national call to action to donate and thanks to all of our future donors. Thank you Mr. President.

Speaker 1: (10:07)
Thank you very much Alex. Appreciate it. Dr. Collins, please.

Francis Collins: (10:13)
Thank you Mr. President and good afternoon everyone. It’s wonderful to be in this beautiful space and thanks very much Gail and everybody at Red Cross for hosting us here while we try to make it clear what a remarkable gift Americans have been giving by donating plasma if they’ve recovered from COVID-19 because that has the potential to help lots of people. Your own human body is a wonderful little biotechnology factory, even if you might not think about it that way. Your immune system is ready to take on whatever kind of pathogen happens to wander into your environment and potentially threaten you and we know this is a particularly impressive virus for what it can do, and yet most of us, thank God, once exposed to this, do figure out how to recover from it because that immune system kicks into gear and makes those antibodies that then allow the virus to lose the battle and you to win and now having done so, you’re in a position to be able to donate your biotechnology product which is your plasma to somebody else who’s just now getting sick with this disease and you have a chance to help them if their own factory hasn’t quite kicked in.

Americans are amazing and the way in which people have been doing this is truly inspiring. Americans seem to believe that biblical verse, “Onto whom much has been given much will be required.” To whom coronavirus has been given and they’ve recovered apparently, they have recognized that they have something else that they can do to help the next person, and that is inspiring, and we’re here to encourage more and more people to see that as something practical and important they can do at the time of this global pandemic. You already heard though from the comments made by the secretary that this is part of a remarkable menu of therapeutics, treatments that are being developed against coronavirus and this particular one also opens the door to other kinds of immune therapy, the monoclonal antibodies that were mentioned where money has now been devoted to scaling that up with a company called Regeneron is basically to take the part of a convalescent plasma that we think is the most potent and figure out how to turn that into a purified product. Not quite there to show yet whether that works but that is also a very promising approach, and there are a couple of trials of monoclonal antibodies from other companies that are on the launching pad starting as soon as tomorrow.

So all of this fits together with what the Trump administration has been doing through Operation Warp Speed to literally bring all hands on deck from the public sector, from the private sector, nobody worrying too much about who’s going to get the credit, let’s just move this forward and save lives and all of the Americans who have been donating their plasma are a big part of that team. So thanks, it’s wonderful to be part of this event this afternoon.

Speaker 1: (13:03)
Thank you Francis. Appreciate it very much. Kate, please.

Kate: (13:12)
Thank you Mr. President for having this important event today. America’s Blood Centers is the national trade association for independent community blood centers. Our members are responsible for over 60% of the nation’s blood supply and have been at the forefront of convalescent plasma collections in the U.S. over the past four months. There are more than 60 independent community blood centers as well as hospital blood banks operating hundreds of donation facilities, taking part in the effort to collect convalescent plasma, to ensure this product gets to every patient in every hospital across the country. We’re excited to announce today that as of this week, independent community blood centers have distributed more than 100,000 doses of COVID-19 convalescent plasma to patients in need. Every blood center, small, medium and large, across the country has mobilized to do their part in this effort. Of course we are not slowing or stopping down in any kind of way. We are mobilizing to do even more and we are projecting that we will double our current number of doses by the end of August.

Kate: (14:18)
This unprecedented response by community blood centers demonstrates their commitment to meeting patient need wherever it is. America’s Blood Centers and its members will continue to collaborate with the administration, federal agencies and all stakeholder partners to ensure in advance the safe collection and distribution of convalescent plasma. Now the single most important thing of our ability to do more in distributing convalescent plasma is having donors and so this event is so important in terms of our ability to educate the American public and encourage them to donate. I would say that when you make a donation appointment and appointments are critical here at your local blood center, you’ll go through a process, the whole appointment takes about 90 minutes, and it’s a safe and easy way to help your fellow Americans. So we are following, all blood centers are following social distancing protocols. They’ve implemented infection disease protocols as well so this is a very safe and easy way to help others. So thank you again for having this event and we look forward to being part of this effort.

Speaker 1: (15:22)
Thank you very much Kate. Appreciate it. Tony and Deborah, please.

Dr. Anthony Fauci: (15:29)
Thank you very much Mr. President for support of this very important program. When we talk about what is going on in this country and the challenge we’re facing, we often say that it’s something where we are all in it together and we all have to pull together. An important part of the process of being in it together and pulling together is helping each other, and I can think of nothing more manifesting to helping of each other than someone donating from their experience of being ill and this is something that I think is part of the American spirit and we should be proud of it and we should show it, so it’s a very important thing. It’s an important part of the entire response to this outbreak.

I want to mention that when we do something like give convalescent plasma, it’s important to understand as several of us have mentioned that it is an important part of the spectrum of interventions and response. We have good therapies and we’ll get better therapies for people with advanced disease. We have the dexamethasone for the people on ventilators, the Remdesivir with people who have been hospitalized, who have lung involvement, and now we’re talking about another important part of intervention. It’s the intervention early in infection to prevent people from needing to go to the hospital, and that’s really what convalescent plasma is because the mechanism of it is directed against the virus. It’s taking the machinery that Francis had spoken about that the body makes to get a protein to block the virus and that’s exactly what this is all about.

Now it’s also important to point out that this could be a proof of concept because when antibodies work, it tells you a few things. It will tell you that when you have a vaccine and you induce antibodies, it could work and this is the good news that’s juxtaposed to what happened a couple of days ago when we went into the Phase III trial for a vaccine. Some of you may have heard me say that I was cautiously optimistic, a word that I use often, that we will be successful with a vaccine. One of the reasons is that in the Phase I study, the vaccine-induced response that was comparable if not better than what we see in convalescent plasma. So here’s [inaudible 00:17:59] a vaccine essentially merges with the work we’re doing now with convalescent plasma. That’s the reason why we think it’s so important and why it’s so important for people to donate. Thank you Mr. President.

Speaker 1: (18:11)
Thank you very much Tony. Thanks.

Thank you Mr. President and thank you for lending your voice to the day’s important to call of action. I’m really making the two critical points of what we’re calling every American to do. Thank you for noting how important it is for every American to give back by wearing a mask, by socially distancing, and from avoiding crowded places where they may not be able to social distance or wear a mask and we know what we’re talking about, parties and bars. Thank you for also really calling to action for those who have recovered to donate life-saving plasma to others and I think these two pieces together, knitted together to stop the spread of the virus through masks, social distancing and avoiding crowded spaces either indoors or outdoors and protecting the vulnerable and at the same time calling for action to increase our therapeutic abilities to treat more patients. Thank you.

Speaker 1: (19:05)
Thank you very much. Please. Thank you.

Adam: (19:13)
Mr. President, thank you for having us today and thank you for this national call to action. We think it’s very important. At LabCorp our employees have been working seven days a week three shifts a day to try to perform as many tests as fast as we possibly can to see who has the virus. I’m proud to say that today, we can do 180,000 tests per day and we can turn those tests around in one day for priority patients and two to three days for all other patients and I want to thank Dr. Hahn, Admiral Giroir, Secretary Azar for all of their help to ensure that we have what we need to get these tests turned around even faster and we’re going to continue to build capacity. At the same time we realize that there’s more that LabCorp can do and since the beginning we are a part of a coalition called The Fight Is In Us and it’s a group of companies that came together to try to encourage people that have had the disease in the

Adam: (20:03)
Companies that came together to try to encourage people that have had the disease in the past to give plasma. To accelerate that we’re going to announce in the next several days that we will have free high affinity antibody tests available for anybody through their physician, where if they’re going for routine blood work the physicians could just add on an antibody test we will run it. And the only thing that we ask is if the patient has antibodies that they please consider to donate plasma.

It’s a great idea thank you very much, appreciated. Dr. Haln, please.

Thank you Mr. President. Based upon your call to action FDA has responded to remove any unnecessary barriers to the speeding of medical products during this pandemic. I want to thank American Red Cross and American blood centers for the collaboration that we’ve had and the development of the [inaudible 00:20:56] and plasma program. Mr. President and secretaries I mentioned in March FDA began working with our colleagues to develop this program. The Mayo clinic has initiated what’s called an expanded access program which has really allowed physicians around the country to order convalescent plasma as an early treatment for patients. A number of clinical trials beyond the expanded access program are taking place. We’re encouraged by the data, we’ve seen that this is a safe treatment and we’re encouraged by the early promising data that we’ve seen and as the president mentioned, we’re studying these data to determine ultimately the safety and efficacy of this product.

In the meantime, we know that doctors are writing these orders to patients who were hospitalized need this so the call to action to donate is so important. And even if at the end of the day, convalescent plasma doesn’t turn out to be the treatment we think it might be, remember that your donations still count with the American blood centers and American Red Cross.

They can truly save lives. And just to put another point on the therapeutics development FDA’s now overseeing over 200 clinical trials of therapies that the great American biomedical research enterprises put forward. And more than 400 are in the planning stages. So we have a tremendous pipeline of therapies for COVID-19. It’s been an unbelievable private and public partnership and Mr. President thank you for your leadership.

Stephen could you give a few words on the speed with which we’re getting the vaccines out and hopefully approved and finalized and where we are with phase one two and three et cetera?

Yes sir. We have a number of companies that have come forward with vaccine candidates. Some of those are in Operation Warp Speed, and I want to emphasize the fact that FDA has a very bright line drawn between its actions and Operation Warp Speed. We are the independent regulator and as the president said, we’ll ultimately calling the balls and strikes with respect to the safety and efficacy of a vaccine.

We have six vaccine candidates that have come to FDA and we given them the safe to proceed into clinical trials. Two are currently in the latest phase of trials called phase three, and they started this week. Another one is planning to go into phase three in August and then an additional three are in other phases of the clinical development. Four additional vaccines have come to us and we expect to allow them to go forward fairly soon. And then there are a number of 50 plus vaccines that have come in house for the pre-application process. I think we can all agree that this has been sort of a remarkable effort from when the virus was first identified at the NIH and sequences made to the initiation of the first clinical trial. NID spending a lot of time getting that to that point. It really is record speed but also at your direction Mr. President we aren’t cutting corners with respect to the development. And we will not be cutting corners with respect to the assessment and the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.

And you’re literally many, many months and even years ahead of schedule in terms of the problem. So we really appreciate the FDA. Please let everyone know how we feel all of us, thank you. Great job. Jerome please.

Jerome: (24:14)
Thank you Mr. President. I really appreciate you being here today. The theme of this national call to action is we’re in this together. And when I think about all of us being in this together, I think about an iconic American image. Rosie, the Riveter. Rosie, the Riveter became a part of our history because we were at war. People were scared, people felt helpless, but the American spirit is all about people coming together, coming together to defeat a common enemy. And we have a common enemy now it’s COVID-19, but we also have tools that everyone can bring to bear to really help us overcome this enemy. One of those is convalescent plasma. One thing I want to add to the discussion that hasn’t been brought up yet is that the average age of donation of blood and plasma is over the age of 60.

Jerome: (25:15)
So to the young people out there, we’ve got some work to do, the seniors are showing us up. We need everyone to do their part because we’re all in this together. I also want to foot stamp something that Dr. Birx mentioned and that Dr. Fauci mentioned. There’s a spectrum that we have here of treatments that are way downstream, treatments that are midstream and then preventative measures that we can all take because we’re all in this together. And Mr. President, I want to thank you for emphasizing the three W’s. Number one, wash your hands. Number two, watch your distance. Number three, wear a mask. I was in Miami just a few weeks ago and I promised them I would tell you this. I was in Trump country and they told me to deliver you a message Mr. President. They told me to tell you you look bad ass in a face mask. I promised them I would tell you that, Miami I told the president he looks bad ass in a face mask. We are all in this together. Give blood, give plasma, save a life. We’ll get through this America.

Thank you Jerome.

Jerome: (26:27)
Thank you.

Please.

Paul Perreault: (26:32)
Thank you Mr. President for having me here today. And really to join with the partners that are here together to join our mission of combating this disease with our particular expertise and technologies. I also want to thank you for your leadership. I think that no one has seen this in the world, it takes resolve and it takes effort. And you’ve shown that both with your leadership but also with the founding of Operation Warp Speed. So thank you for that. I also want to thank you for your outstanding team that we’re working with. Great people, really have done a fantastic job and for proactively engaging the private sector to combat COVID-19. I am Paul Perreault, I’m the CEO of CSL limited. Our legacy in fighting infectious disease goes back to 1901 with Emil von Behring, who was the first Nobel prize winner in medicine. Who actually utilized plasma as a means to fighting off diptheria.

So our history is long in this space. Since then CSL’s been committed to innovating and developing therapies for rare and serious diseases. That’s our business. We currently have several RND programs that are fighting for COVID-19. Including vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and plasma therapies. We are one of the world’s largest collectors of plasma. I’m here today representing all of the manufacturers of hyperimmune. Including the COVID-19 Plasma Alliance, which is really an unprecedented partnership with world leading plasma companies who have joined together to help develop a plasma therapy to treat COVID-19. And I have to say that the help from the FTC was important as well because we’re typically competitors and this is really a combination of all of these companies working together.

The plasma donated by people who have fought off COVID-19 as you’ve already heard, has precious antibodies. Really important antibodies to fight off this disease. These antibodies can be isolated and then they can be converted into what we term a hyperimmune plasma therapy that in theory could be used to treat active COVID-19 infections. It builds on the concept of plasma transfusion, but the product is more like a standard medicine. This is an important approach and it’s well established in treating other infectious diseases like rabies or tetanus. Working jointly with the NIH, the major plasma manufacturers have designed a clinical trial that will be enrolling individuals in the month of August.

And if the data from this supports our hypothesis, we could be in a position to submit the hyperimmune therapy to Dr. Haln for immune therapy against COVID-19 by the end of this year. But we need plasma and we need plasma donors. So we need them wherever they are, we need them to donate blood. We need them to donate plasma. And we also need plasma in general because plasma is used to treat other rare diseases. So this-

Because plasma is used to treat other rare diseases. So this call to action that we’re in this together, the fight is in us, we have to work together, and this call to action to donate plasma and help us fight against COVID-19 is really an important step in making this happen. So we thank you for bringing us together. And thank you, Gail, for hosting us.

And I hope you’ll be able to do it even before the end of the year, and maybe substantially before that from what I’m hearing. Okay? Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Would anybody have any questions of these very brilliant people having to do with plasma, antibodies? Any questions? Steve, go ahead.

Steve: (30:40)
I was going to ask, the death toll is now 150,000. What is the current projection going forward? What should we expect in the next couple of months?

Well, I’d like to perhaps, Tony, do you want to discuss that, please?

You know, as many as we possibly can. I mean, really. Because if you look at it, we almost will not have enough that would be utilizable, particularly not only for the administration, but also what was just mentioned about the supply of the hyperimmune globulin. So really an unlimited amount. There really is as many as we possibly can get, in the hundreds of thousands.

Speaker 2: (31:17)
Are you going to recommend that Americans wear goggles as well as face masks to defend against the virus? Is that going to become a new CDC recommendation?

I can tell you, I only heard of goggles for the first time about one hour ago. Now I’m hearing about goggles. So I don’t know. Deborah, do you want to discuss that?

So I believe Dr. Fauci talked about this yesterday, but we have in the hospital systems and have for exposure have had people using face shields. And I think you’ve seen that through my tour through the United States and 14 states across the country where the president sent me to make sure that we were combating the virus well on the ground. Tennessee has created teachers, special teacher packs, to ensure that every teacher has a face mask, a face shield, gloves, and hand sanitizers. And I think we’re trying to bring these best practices back to ensure that teachers feel safe in the classroom in the same way that doctors and nurses feel safe in the hospitals to decrease their exposure.

I think when you look at Miami, by the way, or Florida in particular, it looks like things are getting much better. Arizona getting much better, heading down, heading in the right direction. Some other areas getting much better. It could be catching on, unfortunately, in a couple of areas. We don’t know quite yet, but we’ll be able to report that soon. But some very big progress being made in some of the states that two weeks ago looked like they were going to be quite bad. Had some great progress made. All right. Any other questions please?

Tom Howell: (32:51)
Mr. President. Tom Howell, Washington Times. Are you concerned at all about the lag time it takes to get a test back? We’ve heard reports a week or more, generally from LabCorp talking about that a little bit. What’s going on there? Has there been improvement?

So we’re getting mostly now we’re ordering as many of the immediate tests, which is five minutes to 15 minutes, even a little bit less than, in some cases, than five minutes. But we’re trying to get those tests. We have pretty close to 50% I call them short term tests. But we’re up to about a 50%, which is amazing. The other tests, while good, you have to send them, then they have to do the work, and they have to send them back. So the process takes long just in terms of delivery. We really are liking the short term tests where you find out immediately whether or not you have a problem. And that’s what we’re striving for, but we’re already up to approximately 50%. Is that correct, Deborah?

I think with the new antigen tests that are available now to nursing homes, that will really help our turnaround times to get them out more specifically. But you haven’t charged us to get that turnaround time down across the board. And we’re working with FDA to make pooling available. The reason LabCorp has been able to decrease their turnaround time so remarkably is they moved to pooling several weeks ago. That’s dramatically increasing our throughput throughout the country. And so we really need to call on all the laboratories to learn from LabCorp and others that are doing pooling like [inaudible 00:34:23] and LabCorp to really increase our turnaround times, to decrease our turnaround times. We know that it’s possible that we can decrease it by at least 50% if all of our laboratories moved to pooling. So sir, we’re doing as you said and we’re going to decrease those turnaround times.

Good, thank you. And how is LabCorp doing about turnaround?

Adam: (34:40)
Yes, sir. Right now, Mr. President, for priority patients, those in hospitals or those in nursing homes and hotspots, within one day we can turn them around. For everybody else across the country, we’ve turned those around in two to three days on average. And we can do 180,000 of those tests per day, and we’re still increasing capacity. And as Dr. Birx said, we’re going to be doing pooling and multiple other things. So we will continue to work hard.

So then for nursing homes, one day. And something more than that for everyone else. But three days looks like it’s a pretty good target.

Adam: (35:15)
On average, two to three days. So we shoot for two to three days. So we can get it to two days on average-

Well, that’s very good. Would be happy with those numbers. And numbers that we are happy with and we use a certain test around here that goes very quickly. And it’s just been recently developed so we’ve done an amazing job. Everybody at this table has done really an amazing job in coming up with testing and testing that works. Steve, go ahead.

Steve: (35:42)
One issue that has come up is once you do have a vaccine, how do you properly distribute it? How do you get it out quickly?

Well, when we have the vaccine, we have the military all lined up. And the military is going to be doing it in a very powerful manner. These are people that don’t usually do vaccines, they do soldiers, and they do lots of other things that frankly are more difficult, but we have a general. And logistically, he’s all set. Tony, do you want to say something about that?

That is correct. As the vaccine rolls out, we’ll be getting them distributed. And as you probably have heard, we are going to make sure that we do it in an equitable way and it’s representative of the populations who need it the most. And we have the standard way that we determine that with the ACRP working with the CDC. But Dr. Collins and Dr. Redfield have put together, with the National Academy of Medicine, a group that will fortify that decision making process so that we’re making sure that we’re very fair and equitable in getting the vaccine distributed properly.

And I think I could have Francis say that tremendous progress has been made on the vaccine beyond anything that we would have thought if you go back six months. What do you think?

It is just frankly quite astounding, Mr. President, I’ve been at NIH for 27 years and Director for 11. And I’ve seen some amazing things happen. But the way in which the whole research community, public and private, philanthropies, everybody has come together to work on this, not worrying about who gets the credit, trying to figure out how to strip away anything that’s going to slow things down. And I think all of us, motivated by the fact that this is the most serious problem we’ve encountered in our professional lifetimes, even a day matters. And so that’s why a lot of people look kind of sleepy because we’re all working 24/7 trying to make sure that nothing possibly slows this process down.

Yeah, the vaccines, this week, it’s a big week, as you just heard, having two phase three trials started in the very same day, this past Monday. And based upon very impressive phase one data showing that people who got that in the phase one trials developed these high levels of neutralizing antibodies that should be very predictive of protection, but you don’t know until you actually run the trial in those 30,000 people.

By the way, you heard earlier about coronavirus.gov, which is the place you can go to to find out how you can donate plasma. There’s another thing you can do if you go to that website, which is to sign up to say you’re interested in a vaccine trial. And we need people to volunteer for that as well because we’re going to, with these four or five trials coming along very quickly, each of which needs 30,000 volunteers, that’s a lot of people and we need them.

And Francis, we’re working very well with other countries.

We are indeed. And science has always international and it certainly is right now. And we work with our colleagues in Europe, and the UK, and Asia in a way that I think represents the best of the best. And again, everybody recognizes we’re all in this together across the whole planet.

Okay. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Donald Trump Roundtable Transcript on Donating Plasma July 30

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