In a recent White House Rose Garden announcement, President Trump singled out Montana Senator Steve Daines’ work in helping industry leaders and scientists get the materials they need to develop treatments and a vaccine for COVID 19.
“Through an historic series of funding bills my administration is providing roughly $10 billion to support a medical research effort without parallel,” said President Trump. “I especially want to thank Senator Steve Daines of Montana for his incredible work. He has worked so hard to secure additional funding for vaccine development, where he has been right at the forefront.”
In addition, Daines was touted on the CBS News Face the Nation program by former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb for his work in accelerating coronavirus drug development.
“I think absolutely,” said Dr. Gottlieb. “We can have a drug, a potential prophylactic drug that can help prevent people from getting an infection, or even treating an 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 on Capitol Hill that may be included in the final package that would basically scale up manufacturing for the promising treatments that make it into the government sanctioned trials.”
Gottlieb said the industry is ramping up production of these treatments.
“We’re ready to distribute it on a mass scale,” said Dr. Gottlieb. “You have literally millions of doses available, so that if one of them ends up working then we’re ready to distribute it on a mass scale.”
Congress is looking at several different medical options in working to fight the COVID 19 pandemic.