Coronavirus will ‘fade away’ even without vaccine, Trump claims days before Tulsa re-election rally
- The US has continued to record 20,000 new daily cases from a pandemic that so far has killed 117,000 people in the country
- Trump’s aides have sought to cast the US response to the coronavirus pandemic as ‘cause for celebration’ but most Americans disagree
“We’re very close to a vaccine and we’re very close to therapeutics, really good therapeutics,” Trump said in a television interview with Fox News. “But even without that, I don’t even like to talk about that, because it’s fading away, it’s going to fade away, but having a vaccine would be really nice and that’s going to happen.”
The US has continued to record 20,000 new daily cases from a pandemic that so far has killed 117,000 people in the country. The president has called for easing restrictions on public activity that were imposed to slow the spread of the virus but that plunged the US into recession.
Anthony Fauci, the head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has said a vaccine could be ready by the end of the year or the first few months of 2021. More than 130 vaccines against coronavirus are in development, according to the World Health Organisation.
But Fauci, a member of the White House’s mostly mothballed coronavirus task force, also warned last week that the infection won’t “burn itself out with mere public health measures”.