Vaccine within a month – Trump

POLL TOOL: WILL RUSHED PRODUCT BE APPROVED?

Democrats concerned president wants it now to aid uphill re-election bid.

US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday a coronavirus vaccine may be available within a month – an acceleration of even his own optimistic predictions – but added the pandemic could go away by itself.

“We’re very close to having a vaccine,” he told a town hall question-and-answer session with voters in Pennsylvania aired on ABC News. “We’re within weeks of getting it, you know – could be three weeks, four weeks,” he said.

Only hours earlier, speaking to Fox News, Trump had said a vaccine could come in “four weeks, it could be eight weeks”.

Democrats have expressed concern that Trump is putting political pressure on government health regulators and scientists to approve a rushed vaccine in time to help turn around his uphill bid for re-election against challenger Joe Biden on 3 November.

Experts, including top US government infectious diseases doctor Anthony Fauci, say vaccine approval is more likely toward the end of the year.

At the town hall, Trump was asked why he had downplayed the gravity of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has now killed close to 200 000 people in the US.

Trump replied: “I didn’t downplay it. I actually, in many ways, I up-played it in terms of action.”

But he told journalist Bob Woodward he had deliberately decided to “play it down” to avoid alarming Americans.

Returning to one of his most controversial views on the virus, which government scientists say will remain a danger for some time, Trump insisted “it is going to disappear”.

“It would go away without the vaccine but it’s going to go away a lot faster with it,” he said. Challenged about how the virus would go away by itself, he said “you’ll develop like a herd mentality”, apparently meaning the concept of herd immunity, when enough people have developed resistance to the disease to effectively stop transmission.

“It’s going to be herd developed and that’s going to happen. That will all happen but with a vaccine, I think it will go away very quickly. But I really believe we’re rounding the corner,” he said.

The president, who is rarely seen wearing a mask in public and has long refused to push Americans to adopt the habit, said “a lot of people don’t want to wear masks and people don’t think masks are good”.

Asked what people he meant, Trump answered: “Waiters. They come over and serve you and they have a mask,” he said.

“They’re playing with the mask. I’m not blaming them. I’m just saying what happens. So the mask is over and they’re touching it, and then touching the plate, and that can’t be good.”