72 active trials underway across US on coronavirus: Trump

Washington: US President Donald Trump has said there are 72 active trials underway across the country researching dozens of therapies and treatments for the coronavirus and tremendous progress is being made on vaccines.

According to the President, there are therapies designed to attack the virus as well as others that would hinder its replication, reduce the rate of infection, control the immune response or transfer life savings antibodies from the blood of recovered patients.

“There are now 72 active trials underway across the United States researching dozens of therapies and treatments and another 211 are in the planning stages. They are literally mobilising on therapeutics and also on vaccines, and tremendous progress is being made on vaccines and I must say on therapeutics,” Trump told reporters at his daily White House news conference on the coronavirus on Monday.

From the day this crisis began, America launched a scientific mobilisation of colossal size and scale, he said.

“Someday they will be able to write the true story because nobody has seen anything like it,” the President said, accusing the mainstream media for refusing to cover it correctly.

“If I had my choice give me



the therapeutics right now because that would help people right now and we have some things that I think are working… not only working but we have some incredible things that look like they could be an answer but we will know soon. Being tested, working out right now,” he said.

Trump has been pushing for the use of malaria drug hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of coronavirus patients.

On Monday he did not mention this drug, a large consignment of which has come from India.

“…tremendous things are happening, you will be seeing that over the weeks. We will be talking about it in the not-too-distant future,” he said.

Johnson & Johnson, he said, is very well along on vaccines. Vaccines have to be tested yet, therapeutics are for now, he noted.

“A lot of good things are happening on both but ultimately we also hope to prevent infection through a safe, a very safe vaccine and that will be a great thing when we have that and we will have that,” Trump added.

The number of people killed in the US due to COVID-19 has reached 42,094, according to Johns Hopkins University, and more than 750,000 cases have been confirmed.