White House coronavirus task force expert Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that a coronavirus vaccine would be ready for testing on humans in “a month or so.” However, it will take at least a year for it to be safe and prepared for the general public.
“I don’t want to over-promise. I said a month and a half the other day; it may be about a month or so. And then very soon, we’ll be sticking the first person with the vaccine,” Fauci told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House Tuesday.Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, spoke after touring National Institutes of Health facilities in Maryland with President Donald Trump.“We just had the opportunity to take the president and show him the actual individual researchers who are doing the things that we’ve been talking about,” Fauci said. “The actual scientists — middle level, senior, junior — were there and explained to the president what I have actually been explaining to the press, but showed it on graphics: how after the virus was identified, the sequence was taken and put into this platform called Messenger RNA.”
Trump donated his fourth-quarter 2019 salary to the Department of Health and Human Services, where it will be used to support the efforts to combat COVID-19.
This is not the first time Trump has donated his salary to an agency facing an urgent problem. Since taking office, Trump has directed his $400,000 annual salary to a different agency each quarter.Previous donations have gone to, among others, the Office of the Surgeon General to help combat the opioid epidemic, to the Department of Homeland Security to help build a wall on the southern border, and to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, to help combat alcoholism.
Washington state health officials identified three new coronavirus fatalities, including two patients who died on Feb. 26 and weren’t previously linked to COVID-19, bringing the total number of US deaths to 9.
The two patients who died that day were affiliated with the Life Care Center of Kirkland, where several residents have fallen ill and at least three others have died. One of the patients, a female resident in her 80s, died in her family home. The other patient, a 54-year-old man, was transferred to the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle from Life Care on Feb. 24 and had underlying medical conditions, the hospital said in a statement….“This is a very fluid, fast-moving situation as we aggressively respond to this outbreak,” Dr. Jeff Duchin, health officer for Seattle & King County public health, said in a statement. “People with suspected or confirmed exposure to COVID-19 should reach out to their healthcare provider. As public health professionals we really appreciate clinicians on the front lines of patient care and they are critical to this response.”
I suspect this won’t be the only instance of this:
The first coronavirus patient in New Hampshire — an employee of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center — defied instructions from public health officials to stay away from other people.In a statement, the state Department of Health and Human Services said the patient attended an invitation-only private event Friday “despite having been directed to self-isolate.”
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