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Coronavirus Response

President Trump’s swift, decisive response to the Coronavirus saved millions of American lives. Amid heavy criticism, President Trump halted travel from China, restricted all other foreign travel into the United States, and rapidly repatriated more than 100,000 American citizens stranded abroad.

He established the Coronavirus Task Force to manage the Administration’s response efforts and launched Operation Warp Speed, which successfully saw two safe and effective Coronavirus vaccines in distribution by the end of 2020. The President’s historic investment in the U.S. industrial base was the largest since World War II, and he invoked the Defense Production Act more than 100 times to accelerate the manufacture of essential materials and lifesaving personal protective equipment (PPE).

On President Trump’s watch, the United States led the world in Coronavirus testing and pioneered groundbreaking treatments and therapies that reduced the mortality rate by 85 percent—saving over 2 million lives.

COVID-Response Summary

Administration Achievements
LIFE-SAVING RESPONSE TO THE CORONAVIRUS

Restricted travel to the United States from infected regions of the world

  • Suspended all travel from China, saving thousands of lives
  • Required all American citizens returning home from designated outbreak countries to return through designated airports with enhanced screening measures and to undergo a self-quarantine
  • Announced further travel restrictions on Iran, the Schengen Area of Europe, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Brazil
  • Issued travel advisory warnings recommending that American citizens avoid all international travel
  • Reached bilateral agreements with Mexico and Canada to suspend non-essential travel and expeditiously return illegal aliens
  • Repatriated over 100,000 American citizens stranded abroad with more than 1,140 flights from 136 countries and territories
  • Safely transported, evacuated, treated, and returned home trapped passengers on cruise ships
  • Took action to authorize visa sanctions on foreign governments who impede our efforts to protect American citizens by refusing or unreasonably delaying the return of their own citizens, subjects, or residents from the United States

Acted early to combat the virus in the United States

  • Established the White House Coronavirus Task Force, with leading experts on infectious diseases, to manage the Administration’s efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and keep workplaces safe
  • Pledged in the State of the Union address to “take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from the virus,” while the Democrats’ response made not a single mention of COVID-19 or even the threat of China
  • Declared COVID-19 a National Emergency under the Stafford Act
  • Established the 24/7 FEMA National Response Coordination Center
  • Released guidance recommending containment measures critical to slowing the spread of the virus, decompressing peak burden on hospitals and infrastructure, and diminishing health impacts
  • Implemented strong community mitigation strategies to sharply reduce the number of lives lost in the United States down from experts’ projection of up to 2.2 million deaths in the United States without mitigation
  • Halted American funding to the World Health Organization to counter its egregious bias towards China that jeopardized the safety of Americans
  • Announced plans for withdrawal from the World Health Organization and redirected contribution funds to help meet global public health needs
  • Called on the United Nations to hold China accountable for their handling of the virus, including refusing to be transparent and failing to contain the virus before it spread

Repurposed domestic manufacturing facilities to ensure frontline workers had critical supplies

  • Distributed billions of pieces of personal protective equipment (PPE), including gloves, masks, gowns, and face shields
  • Invoked the Defense Production Act over 100 times to accelerate the development and manufacturing of essential material in the USA
  • Made historic investments of more than $3 billion into the U.S. industrial base
  • Contracted with companies such as Ford, General Motors, Philips, and General Electric to produce ventilators
  • Contracted with Honeywell, 3M, O&M Halyard, Moldex, and Lydall to increase our Nation’s production of N-95 masks
  • The Army Corps of Engineers built 11,000 beds, distributed 10,000 ventilators, and surged personnel to hospitals
  • Converted the Javits Center in New York into a 3,000-bed hospital, and opened medical facilities in Seattle and New Orleans
  • Dispatched the USNS Comfort to New York City, and the USNS Mercy to Los Angeles
  • Deployed thousands of FEMA employees, National Guard members, and military forces to help in the response
  • Provided support to states facing new emergences of the virus, including surging testing sites, deploying medical personnel, and advising on mitigation strategies
  • Announced Federal support to governors for use of the National Guard with 100 percent cost-share
  • Established the Supply Chain Task Force as a “control tower” to strategically allocate high-demand medical supplies and PPE to areas of greatest need
  • Requested critical data elements from states about the status of hospital capacity, ventilators, and PPE
  • Executed nearly 250 flights through Project Air Bridge to transport hundreds of millions of surgical masks, N95 respirators, gloves, and gowns from around the world to hospitals and facilities throughout the United States
  • Signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure that Americans have a reliable supply of products like beef, pork, and poultry
  • Stabilized the food supply chain restoring the Nation’s protein processing capacity through a collaborative approach with Federal, state, and local officials, as well as industry partners
  • The continued movement of food and other critical items of daily life distributed to stores and to American homes went unaffected

Replenished the depleted Strategic National Stockpile

  • Increased the number of ventilators nearly ten-fold to more than 153,000
  • Despite the grim projections from the media and governors, no American who has needed a ventilator has been denied a ventilator
  • Increased the number of N95 masks fourteen-fold to more than 176 million
  • Issued an executive order ensuring critical medical supplies are produced in the United States

Created the largest, most advanced, and most innovative testing system in the world

  • Built the world’s leading testing system from scratch, conducting over 200 million tests—more than all of the European Union combined
  • Engaged more than 400 test developers to increase testing capacity from less than 100 tests per day to more than 2 million tests per day
  • Slashed red tape and approved Emergency Use Authorizations for more than 300 different tests, including 235 molecular tests, 63 antibody tests, and 11 antigen tests
  • Delivered state-of-the-art testing devices and millions of tests to every certified nursing home in the country
  • Announced more flexibility to Medicare Advantage and Part D plans to waive cost-sharing for tests
  • Over 2,000 retail pharmacy stores, including CVS, Walmart, and Walgreens, are providing testing using new regulatory and reimbursement options
  • Deployed tens of millions of tests to nursing homes, assisted living facilities, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), tribes, disaster relief operations, Home Health/Hospice organizations, and the Veterans Health Administration
  • Began shipping 150 million BinaxNOW rapid tests to states, long-term care facilities, the IHS, HBCUs, and other key partners

Pioneered groundbreaking treatments and therapies that reduced the mortality rate by 85 percent, saving over 2 million lives

  • The United States has among the lowest case fatality rates in the entire world
  • The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched the Coronavirus Treatment Acceleration Program to expedite the regulatory review process for therapeutics in clinical trials, accelerate the development and publication of industry guidance on developing treatments, and utilize regulatory flexibility to help facilitate the scaling-up of manufacturing capacity
  • More than 370 therapies are in clinical trials and another 560 are in the planning stages
  • Announced $450 million in available funds to support the manufacturing of Regeneron’s antibody cocktail
  • Shipped tens of thousands of doses of the Regeneron drug
  • Authorized an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for convalescent plasma
  • Treated around 100,000 patients with convalescent plasma, which may reduce mortality by 50 percent
  • Provided $48 million to fund the Mayo Clinic study that tested the efficacy of convalescent plasma for patients with COVID-19
  • Made an agreement to support the large-scale manufacturing of AstraZeneca’s cocktail of two monoclonal antibodies
  • Approved Remdesivir as the first COVID-19 treatment, which could reduce hospitalization time by nearly a third
  • Secured more than 90 percent of the world’s supply of Remdesivir, enough to treat over 850,000 high-risk patients
  • Granted an EUA to Eli Lilly for its antibody treatments
  • Finalized an agreement with Eli Lilly to purchase the first doses of the company’s investigational antibody therapeutic
  • Provided up to $270 million to the American Red Cross and America’s Blood Centers to support the collection of up to 360,000 units of plasma
  • Launched a nationwide campaign to ask patients who have recovered from COVID-19 to donate plasma
  • Announced Phase 3 clinical trials for varying types of blood thinners to treat adults diagnosed with COVID-19
  • Issued an EUA for the monoclonal antibody therapy bamlanivimab
  • FDA issued an EUA for casirivimab and imdevimab to be administered together
  • Launched the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium with private-sector and academic leaders unleashing America’s supercomputers to accelerate Coronavirus research

Brought the full power of American medicine and government to produce a safe and effective vaccine in record time

  • Launched Operation Warp Speed to initiate an unprecedented drive to develop and make available an effective vaccine by January 2021
  • Pfizer and Moderna developed two vaccines in just nine months, five times faster than the fastest prior vaccine development in American history
  • Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines are approximately 95 effective—far exceeding all expectations
  • AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson also both have promising candidates in the final stage of clinical trials
  • The vaccines were prepared for administration within 24 hours of FDA approval
  • Made millions of vaccine doses available before the end of 2020, with hundreds of millions more to quickly follow
  • FedEx and UPS will ship doses from warehouses directly to local pharmacies, hospitals, and healthcare providers
  • Finalized a partnership with CVS and Walgreens to deliver vaccines directly to residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities as soon as a state requests it, at no cost to America’s seniors
  • Signed an executive order to ensure that the United States government prioritizes getting the vaccine to American citizens before sending it to other nations
  • Provided approximately $13 billion to accelerate vaccine development and to manufacture all of the top candidates in advance
  • Provided critical investments of $4.1 billion to Moderna to support the development, manufacture, and distribution of its vaccines
  • Provided Pfizer up to $1.95 billion to support the mass manufacturing and nationwide distribution of their vaccine candidate
  • Provided approximately $1 billion to support the manufacturing and distribution of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine candidate
  • Made up to $1.2 billion available to support AstraZeneca’s vaccine candidate
  • Made an agreement to support the large-scale manufacturing of Novavax’s vaccine candidate with 100 million doses expected
  • Partnered with Sanofi and GSK to support large-scale manufacturing of a COVID-19 investigational vaccine
  • Awarded $200 million in funding to support vaccine preparedness and plans for the immediate distribution and administration of vaccines
  • Provided $31 million to Cytvia for vaccine-related consumable products
  • Under the PREP Act, issued guidance authorizing qualified pharmacy technicians to administer vaccines
  • Announced that McKesson Corporation will produce store, and distribute vaccine ancillary supply kits on behalf of the Strategic National Stockpile to help healthcare workers who will administer vaccines
  • Announced partnership with large-chain, independent, and regional pharmacies to deliver vaccines

Prioritized resources for the most vulnerable Americans, including nursing home residents

  • Quickly established guidelines for nursing homes and expanded telehealth opportunities to protect vulnerable seniors
  • Increased surveillance, oversight, and transparency of all 15,417 Medicare and Medicaid nursing homes by requiring them to report cases of COVID-19 to all residents, their families, and the CDC
  • Required that all nursing homes test staff regularly
  • Launched an unprecedented national nursing home training curriculum to equip nursing home staff with the knowledge they need to stop the spread of COVID-19
  • Delivered $81 million for increased inspections and funded 35,000 members of the National Guard to deliver critical supplies to every Medicare-certified nursing home
  • Deployed Federal Task Force Strike Teams to provide onsite technical assistance and education to nursing homes experiencing outbreaks
  • Distributed tens of billions of dollars in Provider Relief Funds to protect nursing homes, long-term care facilities, safety-net hospitals, rural hospitals, and communities hardest hit by the virus
  • Released 1.5 million N95 respirators from the Strategic National Stockpile for distribution to over 3,000 nursing home facilities
  • Directed the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council to refocus on underserved communities impacted by the Coronavirus
  • Required that testing results reported include data on race, gender, ethnicity, and ZIP code, to ensure that resources were directed to communities disproportionately harmed by the virus
  • Ensured testing was offered at 95 percent of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC), which serve over 29 million patients in 12,000 communities across the Nation
  • Invested an unprecedented $8 billion in tribal communities
  • Maintained safe access for Veterans to VA healthcare throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic and supported non-VA hospital systems and private and state-run nursing homes with VA clinical teams
  • Signed legislation ensuring no reduction of VA education benefits under the GI Bill for online distance learning
Supported Americans as they safely return to school and work
  • Issued the Guidelines for Opening Up America Again, a detailed blueprint to help governors as they began reopening the country
  • Focused on protecting the most vulnerable and mitigating the risk of any resurgence, while restarting the economy and allowing Americans to safely return to their jobs
  • Helped Americans return to work by providing extensive guidance on workplace-safety measures to protect against COVID-19 and investigating over 10,000 Coronavirus-related complaints and referrals
  • Provided over $31 billion to support elementary and secondary schools
  • Distributed 125 million face masks to school districts
  • Provided comprehensive guidelines to schools on how to protect and identify high-risk individuals, prevent the spread of COVID-19, and conduct safe in-person teaching
  • Brought back the safe return of college athletics, including Big Ten and Pac-12 football