Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar warned Monday that even though Dr. Deborah Birx said last week that there may be some signs that coronavirus infections could be coming to a plateau in the hotspot states of Texas, California, Arizona, and Florida, that does not mean the country is out of the woods yet.
"It is really important that people remain vigilant," Azar said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "We think it's due to the fact that people are actually wearing their masks. They are social distancing. They are engaging in good personal hygiene."
In addition, governors in those states have been closing bars where people can't keep socially distanced, said Azar, and people are doing "what we are asking and what the governors are asking. We see it has an impact."
But still, the country needs to make it through the next several months, as there is "so much promise there" in terms of the next generation of therapeutics as well as vaccines, said Azar.
He added that the administration is continuing to work aggressively toward therapeutics and vaccines, and that he and President Donald Trump will travel to North Carolina to observe one of five vaccines the country is invested in, and to see how they are manufactured.
But Azar rejected that there is "politics" involved in the "Operation Warp Speed" effort.
"We need therapeutics and we need vaccines and we need them as quickly as we can get them," Azar said. "We are working to basically shave every day off the development and manufacturing that we can do, but we're going to make sure that any therapeutic or any vaccine is safe and effective up to the FDA's gold standards."
The administration also is working to solve the issue of the turnaround time for coronavirus testing, said Azar.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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