Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn on Sunday said the United States is in a “fundamentally very different” place to deal with the alarming spikes in COVID-19 infections and deaths in some parts of the nation.
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Hahn said there were important lessons learned in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic.
“’We are… in a very fundamentally different place than we were in March and April,” he said. “We have new therapeutics we didn't have at the time — remdesivir, steroids, and the plasma treatment... more testing capacity… but still a concerning trend and really we can stop this by following the guidelines.”
Hahn said it was the FDA’s “solemn promise” to carefully vet any new vaccine developed and “when one becomes available, the U.S. government and others will have a plan for distributing that vaccine to all Americans.”
Hahn repeatedly refused to back President Donald Trump’s assertion in his Independence Day speech that 99% of COVID cases are “completely harmless,” however.
“I’m not going to get into who is right and who is wrong,” he said when pressed for whether that declaration was incorrect.
“What I'm going to say is what I've said before. It's a serious problem that we have. We've seen the surge in cases. We must do something to stem the tide, and we have this in our power to do this by following the guidance from the task force and the CDC.”
“In terms of that specific instance at the White House, it's important for everyone to remember that it's a different set of circumstances,” he added. “People are tested regularly.”