Trump meets with drugmakers on coronavirus vaccine 

President Trump is scheduled to hold a White House meeting Monday with pharmaceutical executives to discuss a coronavirus vaccine and therapeutic treatments to manage viral symptoms. 

Trump said the meeting had been scheduled prior to the coronavirus outbreak and that the original focus was to discuss the lowering of drug prices.  

“We want prices to go way down. But it turns out to be a very convenient meeting as it pertains to the vaccine,” the president said at a White House press conference Saturday about the virus. “Our country is prepared for any circumstance. We hope it’s not going to be a major circumstance, it’ll be a smaller circumstance, but whatever the circumstance is, we’re prepared.”

Trump spoke hours after Washington state officials announced the first coronavirus death in the United States. A second patient, in the same health facility as the first patient, also died over the weekend from the virus, state officials said Sunday.

Also on Saturday, the Food and Drug Administration also said it will allow hundreds of academic hospital labs to begin testing for the coronavirus. 

Previously, government screeners relied on faulty testing kits from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that because of the increased testing capacity by the academic labs, screeners could process “probably 10,000 people a day,” by the end of this week and within two weeks up to 20,000 per day.

A coronavirus vaccine might be more than a year away, but therapeutics could be available much sooner, Dr. Tony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, said last week during a White House press conference. 

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn said Saturday: “We are working very diligently with industry. We’re using our authorities in an expedited fashion to help with the development of therapeutics, particularly around the coronavirus.”

The president said he expected the drug approval process, which can sometimes take years, to receive bipartisan support to be processed more rapidly.

“I think this process will go very quickly,” he said Saturday. “I think Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, this process is going to go very quickly.” 

Marc Palazzo, executive director of the Coalition Against Socialized Medicine, told Just The News that calls from Democratic campaigns like those Bernie Sanders' that call for universal, government-run healthcare would harm the healthcare innovation available in the private sector through profit-based research and development.

“[W]hat I think people need to understand is the R&D for the world and healthcare and pharmaceuticals is the United States,” Palazzo said during an interview Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “We are it. And that's why when folks rail against the pharmaceutical companies, and the profits that they make a lot of that, those dollars and those profits are turned into research and development to develop new drugs that can help people there are on the table now to drugs to deal with this particular virus. .... I think that a socialized system, you don't have that R&D, so that when you have a case like this, you don't have the ability to develop drugs and inoculate against these kinds of viruses that occur.”