Responding to China saying the US needs to
“Yeah well right now our job at the White House has been mainly focused on how do we take care of the American people. We have worked very hard to make sure that we have gotten all the supplies that we need for our health care workers, ah we have made sure that we have produced I think at last year we did 30,000 ventilators, ah we are going to do over 100,000 ventilators in 3 months that we are going to create here in America domestically ah showing that America does have the potential to do tremendous manufacturing capability again and ah we are working now on testing and doing great with that but what we are learning from this so as we take care of the American people we are learning that the president, what he campaigned on, was that we want to make sure that we are bringing manufacturing back, we can’t be reliant on other countries and i imagine after this we will put in place very strong strategies to make sure that America doesn’t have to rely on any other countries for critical supplies in the future.”
Asking about medical shortages
“Look this has been an historic challenge. You have never really had a situation where you had to respond in this quick timeframe to such a massive surge in demand for supplies that we did not make in this country. The Vice President’s task force asked my office of innovation to get involved with the innovation office a cmmi to work on some public private partnerships to work with the existing structure. so we were able to work together to figure out a lot of innovative public private partnerships to get the missions accomplished. So the first one we did was project air bridge where we were able to get now close to 100 flights, massive cargo flights, filled with critical supplies that we didn’t make here in America over to our front line healthcare workers. The health care sector in America is mostly controlled by private sector and not for profit so it’s not run by the government so you needed to take a custom tailored approach and we created a control tower approach with the private company distributers in order to make sure we could be as efficient as possible and it has been quite successful. And now, you know, everyone’s talking about testing and I have to say that the work that’s been done over the last 60 days on testing has been absolutely extraordinary. We are at about 5.8 million in tests now performed, by far the most in the world, and you are going to see that number continue to accelerate. We are starting another round of calls with all the governors today to ask them what additional supplies they need, what’s their 2 month plan, what’s their 6 month plan, and right now we have fulfilled all the orders that the governors have, they have excess capacity in their states. Yesterday governor DeSantis was saying that he has more testing capacity than he has demand for the tests. So we are really doing quite well with that. I always find that we see the leading indicators and often the media sees the lagging indicators but the leading indicators for testing are extraordinarily positive and I’m very confident that we have all the testing that we need to start opening the country in accordance with the safety guidelines that president trump, the vice president, Dr Birx and Dr Fauci laid out. on April 19th.”
Fauci talking about everyone who needs a test should be able to get one by June. Follow up Q by host: Was that the anitbody test, or the ‘I have it' test?
“I believe Dr Fauci was talking about both tests, both the antibody, we are also going to have surveillance testing, we are also going to have diagnostic testing, and so Dr Fauci and Dr Birx gave the innovation team and Admiral Jewar goals that they would like to see hit on testing. We have been able to so far exceed those goals. For the month of April we will have almost 6 million tests in the month which is going to be extraordinary and we are really quite excited for what we will be able to do in May and June and July and beyond. So what we have really done is the hardest work is really developing the test and we needed to engage the commercial market to do that. President trump, the vice president, did that. Now that the tests are out there it’s really about scaling supply chain really in an historic manner and pace. So somebody asked me why it took so long I actually said you should look at how did we do this so quickly and what’s really happened is really truly extraordinary. So we don’t want to let Dr Fauci down and we will make sure that we get enough tests into the market so that we can responsibly test people. And again, the goal here is to get people back to work. The eternal lockdown crowd can make jokes on late night television but the reality is that the data is on our side and president trump has created a pathway to safely open up our country and make sue that we get our economy going and get America back to a place where it will be even stronger than it was before.”
Where is the national strategy and why was the pandemic office collapsed?
“So the pandemic office, that was an NSC situation, but there is a lot of different parts of the government that are responsible for that and all of those have been functioning and again we are on the other side of the medical aspect of this and I think that we have achieved all the different milestones that were needed. So the government, federal government, rose to the challenge and this is a great success story. And I think that’s really what needs to be told.
And in terms of the national strategy that you mentioned with Governor Newsome, look we have been very busy doing, we released the strategy document earlier this week. It was an 8 step plan. And 7 of those steps have been completed. So you can’t accelerate to the levels that needed to be done. A lot of the work is the up front work, that’s all been completed. And again, we have done more tests than any other country in the world so we have got to be doing a lot of things right.”
Trials on vaccine options. How is Fed going to help with vaccines?
“So we have a workstream devoted to that, we are doing everything we can to scale production. You know, with manufacturing you can’t just wave a magic wand. We had a lot of people saying use the defense production act and invent ventilators. Well in order to create a factory and to do this you need to build robots, you need to build assembly lines and so what we have been doing is the forward work on how do we build the capacity and scale. So if they are able to innovate and create the vaccines, we will make sure that we have the production capability to oversupply the market. Now I will just say that part of what makes America such an incredible country is that we have these amazing innovative drug companies and they do an incredible job solving all kinds of disease and I do have to give a big shout out to the FDA which has really worked at record time, they have approved more things in a safe manner in the last couple of months than I think has been done in a very very long time and my big personal hope from this is that we don’t go back to normal course of business after. There has been a real urgency here to solve a problem and the whole government has come together, the whole country has come together. We have worked Democrats with Republicans, and we have put our political differences aside and by doing that we have save hundreds of thousands of American lives and we are also preparing the country so that we can really get as close back to normal as possible as quickly as possible. And I think what you will see in May, as the states are reopening now, is May will be a transition month, you’ll see a lot of states starting to phase in the different reopening based on the safety guidelines that president trump outlined on April 19th. And I think you will see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal and the hope is that by July the country is really rockin again.”