Nashville (US): In the final debate leading up to the US elections November 3, President Donald Trump said Thursday that the COVID-19 vaccine is ‘ready’ and it is coming within a few weeks. His response came after Democratic candidate Joe Biden said that ‘anyone who is responsible for so many deaths in the US’ shouldn’t remain as president. It should be stated here that so far the COVID-19 fatality list in the US is 2,20,000 – more than any other country in the world. Donald Trump retorted by saying that the US will beat the virus.
With more people dead in the United States than in any other country, Trump insisted that COVID-19 would soon go away through medical breakthroughs. He pointed to his own recovery since his first debate.
“Around 220,000 Americans dead. If you hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this,” Biden said at the televised debate here. “Anyone who’s responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America. “We’re about to go into a dark winter. “And he (Trump) has no plan,” Biden added.
After a strikingly bitter first debate, the tone initially changed, with the debate organisers empowered to mute the candidates’ microphones.
Trump hit back that there would be no ‘dark winter’ – and defended his push to reopen the United States as soon as possible. “We’re rounding the turn. We’re rounding the corner. It’s going away,” Trump said. “We have a vaccine that’s coming, it’s ready, it is going to be announced within weeks,” he asserted.
FDA approves use of remdesivir
Meanwhile in a separate development the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the first drug to treat COVID-19: remdesivir. It is an antiviral medicine given through an IV for patients needing hospitalisation.
The drug, which California-based Gilead Sciences Inc. is calling Veklury, cut the time to recovery by five days — from 15 days to 10 on average — in a large study led by the US National Institutes of Health. Remdesivir had been authorised for use on an emergency basis since spring. It now has become the first drug to win full US approval for treating COVID-19.
‘Gilead’ said ‘Veklury’ is approved for people at least 12 years old and weighing at least 40 kilograms. It works by inhibiting a substance the virus uses to make copies of itself.
