Donald Trump has said it is “terrific” that 15% of the US population have been infected with Covid-19 in one of the last bizarre press conferences of his presidency.
Speaking at a White House coronavirus vaccine event, the outgoing US president said on Tuesday: “I hear we’re close to 15 percent. I’m hearing that, and that’s terrific.”
The one-term president was apparently referring to the theory of herd immunity.
Herd immunity refers to a situation where enough people in a population have immunity to an infection to be able to effectively stop that disease from spreading.
Some 70% of the US population of 330 million would need to be inoculated to achieve “herd” immunity from the virus.
Around 285,000 Americans have died with the disease and the pandemic is continuing to surge across the country.
Trump delivered the remarks at the top of a White House summit on vaccine development and distribution just before signing an executive order intended to ensure priority access for Covid-19 vaccines procured by the US government is given to the American people before assisting other nations.
But the executive order does not appear to have a clear enforcement mechanism. At the summit, Trump suggested he would invoke the Defence Production Act if needed. The act, which was passed in 1950, grants the president the power to expand industrial production of key materials or products for national security and other reasons.
“If necessary ... we’ll invoke the Defence Production Act, but we don’t think it will be necessary. If it is, it’s a very powerful act, as you know, because we’ve used it very, very successfully,” he said.
The executive order and the summit itself seemed designed in part to give credit to Trump, who lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden but has refused to concede, for the speedy development of the vaccine.
It came on the same day a 90-year-old grandmother in the UK become the world’s first patient to receive the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine.
Trump also used the event to reassert false claims about widespread electoral fraud when asked about why Biden officials had not been included.
“We’re going to have to see who the next administration is, because we won in those swing states and there was terrible things that went on. ... But whichever the next administration is will really benefit by what we have been able to do,” Trump said.
“Hopefully the next administration will be the Trump administration.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration declined an offer from Pfizer to buy more doses of its Covid-19 vaccine at the end of the summer, according to several reports.
The New York Times first reported on Monday that Pfizer offered to sell the US government more of its promising vaccine candidate, developed in partnership with the German company BioNTech.
The US agreed to buy 100 million doses of the Pfizer drug in July, but the vaccine takes two injections to work, meaning the contract is only enough for 50 million people. At the time, there were several promising vaccine candidates, but none had shown widespread efficacy in late-stage, large-scale trials.
Pfizer has since struck deals with many countries, including the United Kingdom and Australia, and the Times added that the company may not be able to provide the US with more of its vaccine than it already promised due to its commitments to other nations. ABC News later confirmed the report, citing a senior administration official familiar with the talks.