Montana’s Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) has been pressing fellow lawmakers on Capitol Hill to provide economic stimulus relief to the American people. He’s also been front and center in efforts to help develop coronavirus treatments, drawing praise from Vice President Mike Pence and a leading health official.
On Tuesday, Daines said, “once the Senate acts, we’ll be able to accelerate drug development to treat and prevent COVID-19.”
Here’s VP Pence’s exact remarks, according to the White House transcript:
But the good news is that the therapeutics — we expect a little bit later this spring to have some breakthrough therapeutics that will be available, that’ll bring relief to Americans that are struggling with the coronavirus.
And also, in the bill the Senate is considering right now, there’s a provision that’s been championed by Senator Steve Daines, a great senator, and championed by others like Dr. Scott Gottlieb that will actually create resources to allow the manufacturer of different therapies and different approaches so that we’re ready with the supply once we determine which one is most effective.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the Former Food and Drug Administration chief, also praised Daines during an interview on CBS’ Face the Nation. Real Clear Politics has the story:
DR. GOTTLIEB: I think absolutely. We could have a drug, a potential prophylactic drug that could prevent people from getting an infection or even treating infection as early as this summer, especially when you look at some of the approaches where companies are developing antibodies that directly target the virus. I think this is highly promising. We need to be putting a lot of resources into that. Senator Daines introduced a provision in Capitol Hill that may be included in the final package and what it would do is it would basically scale up manufacturing right away for the promising treatments that make it into the government’s sanction trials. So that if one ends up working, we’re ready to distribute it on a mass scale. You have literally millions of doses available. Now, what’s going to happen is a lot of those drugs won’t work and we’re going to end up throwing away the drug that we manufactured. But I think that’s a small price to pay for the benefit of having drug available, if in fact one proves that it’s working.