Washington — Top administration health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield, are testifying before the Senate on Wednesday to discuss the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic. The hearing comes the day after the U.S. passed the grim milestone of 200,000 coronavirus deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Redfield and Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will be joined by Assistant Secretary For Health Dr. Brett Giroir and Dr. Stephen Hahn, the director of the Food and Drug Administration, in a hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP).
How to watch the Senate HELP committee hearing:
- What: Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield, Brett Giroir and Stephen Hahn testify before the Senate HELP Committee.Date: Wednesday, September 23, 2020Time: 10 a.m. ETLocation: Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C.Online stream: Watch live on CBSN in the player above or on your mobile streaming device.
Redfield’s testimony comes the week after President Trump contradicted the CDC director about the timeline for distributing a coronavirus vaccine. At a hearing before a Senate subcommittee last week, Redfield said any vaccine is unlikely to be widely available to most Americans before the summer or early fall of 2021.
“If you’re asking me when is it going to be generally available to the American public so we can begin to take advantage of vaccine to get back to our regular life, I think we’re probably looking at late second quarter, third quarter 2021,” Redfield told lawmakers last Wednesday.
However, at a White House briefing later that day, Mr. Trump continued to claim it would be sooner, insisting that Redfield “made a mistake” and “was confused.” He added that “under no circumstance will it be as late as the doctor said.”
Fauci weighed in on the dispute in an interview with WTOP on Thursday, saying “in many respects, they were both right.”
“The president was saying is that it is entirely conceivable that we will have an answer by October. My projection is that it would likely be November or December,” Fauci said about a vaccine. “If you want to ask the question, what about getting everybody vaccinated so that we can say vaccines have now had a significant impact on how we are able to act in the sense of going back to some degree of normality — that very likely would be in the first half to the third quarter of 2021.”
Efforts to rapidly test, manufacture and distribute the vaccine have left some people skeptical of its safety. There are currently seven companies with vaccines in Phase 3 clinical trials, the final phase of vaccine development which involves large-scale tests on at least 30,000 people.
Audrey McNamara contributed to this report.