Administration of Donald J. Trump, 2020 the President's News
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Administration of Donald J. Trump, 2020 The President's News Conference July 28, 2020 The President. Thank you very much. Today my administration has taken a momentous step toward achieving American pharmaceutical independence—a very, very big, big step—a focus of our campaign to bring America's critical supply chains and medical manufacturing back to the U.S.A. We've been working on this for a long time. This is a core of our strategy to protect our people from the horrible China virus. It should have never happened. It should have never been here. They should have stopped it. In the decades before I took office, foreign nations were allowed to freely plunder our factories and loot our industries, take our business out of the United States. Millions of jobs were vacuumed out, just taken out so easily. Our politicians let that happen. And our communities were stripped and shipped, in many cases, to China and all over the world—countries all over the world. Nearly 4 years ago, we launched a bold effort to revitalize American manufacturing, enact fair trade deals, and bring our industries back home where they belong. When the China virus landed on our shores, it became clearer than ever before that restoring American manufacturing is a core matter of national security. We must never be reliant on a foreign nation for America's medical or other needs, and that includes many other needs. I just want to say that Pfizer just announced, a little while ago, that they're combining phase two and phase three trials, and the vaccine looks like it's really heading in a very rapid direction, in a very positive direction. First time that's happened. And they're many months ahead of any other trial. There's never been anything like it. So it's the fastest ever, and to me, it's very exciting. Today I'm proud to announce one of the most important deals in the history of U.S. pharmaceutical industries. My administration has reached a historic agreement with a great American company—you remember this company; it's called—from the good, old camera age, the old days—to begin producing critical pharmaceutical ingredients. It's called Kodak. And it's going to be right here in America. So I want to congratulate the people in Kodak. They've been working very hard. Members of my administration are present in Rochester right now—Rochester, New York—good place. And they're trying to finalize this groundbreaking deal, and they will be announcing this deal. I want to thank Governor Andrew Cuomo and his representatives. We've worked really well together on this deal. It's a big deal. It's going to be a great deal and a great deal for New York and a great deal for Kodak. Ninety percent of all prescriptions written in the United States are for generic drugs. We have approved more generic drugs than any other administration, by far. Generic drugs can be just as good as the brand names, but cost much less. Yet, in less than 10 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients needed to make these drugs—they're currently manufactured in America—more than 50 percent, however, are made in India and China. And you'll be seeing—a lot of things have happened. It's been happening, but it's happening at a more rapid pace right now. With this new agreement, my administration is using the Defense Production Act to provide a $765 million loan to support the launch of Kodak Pharmaceuticals. It's a great name, when you 1 think of it. Such a great name. It was one of the great brands in the world. Then, people went digital, and Kodak didn't follow. But now, under very extraordinary leadership, they are following, and they're doing something that's a different field, and it's a field that they've really hired some of the best people in the world to be taking care of that company and watching that company—watching over it. But it's a breakthrough in bringing pharmaceutical manufacturing back to the United States. Under this contract, our 33d use of the Defense Production Act—remember when you were saying I didn't use it enough, I didn't use it enough? And now you heard it's the 33d use. We don't talk about it all the time; we used it, and we used it as a little bit of a threat, frankly, with certain companies that weren't doing as we were asking them to do, and it came through as both a threat and a usage. But this is our 33d use of the Defense Production Act. Kodak will now produce generic active pharmaceutical ingredients, which is a big deal. Using advanced manufacturing techniques, Kodak will also make the key starting materials that are the building blocks for many drugs in a manner that is both cost-competitive and environmentally safe. We'll be competitive with almost all countries and soon with all countries. Once this new division is fully operational, in addition to all of the other plants that we've opened with other companies throughout the United States recently, it will produce as much as 25 percent of all active ingredients needed to make generic drugs in the U.S.A. That's a big number: 25 percent. This agreement will directly create 360 new jobs at Kodak's factory in Rochester; that's just in the initial phase. And in Minneapolis, a place I have gotten to know very well, and it's a great place—and I'm very happy that we're able to help them with the problems that they've had recently. And the National Guard—I want to thank the National Guard, both State and beyond. I want to thank them for the incredible job. They went in, and they did some beautiful job. They cleaned it up. You didn't hear about the problems anymore. And indirectly, I want to create—we created thousands more jobs all across our pharmaceutical supply chains. We have now been building a very big pharmaceutical supply chain—not only coming out of China, coming out of other countries also. I want to thank Peter Navarro, Adam Boehler, and Admiral Polowczyk for their tremendous work to make this deal possible. Today's action is our latest step to build the greatest medical arsenal in history. We'll be able to do that. Through the Defense Production Act and other authorities, we have invested more than $3 billion in our Nation's industrial base. We've contracted with companies such as Ford, General Motors, Philips, and General Electric to produce more than 200,000 ventilators by the end of this year, nearly seven times more than we would ever do in a typical year. We've contracted with Honeywell, 3M, O&M, Halyard, Moldex, and Lidl to increase U.S. production of N95 masks. And we've brought it from less than 40 million a month to over 100 million a month by August, and we'll have 160 million in a very short while, 160 million a month. That's many times what we used to do. If you go back 2 years ago, it's many, many times. We're increasing domestic production of gloves by 1,000 percent. It's 1,000 percent. We will be manufacturing 450 million gloves annually by next year. We're finalizing contracts with our textile industry to make gowns in America with American fabric, which makes a lot of our businesses happy that produce the fabric. We have 13 million reusable gowns in the stockpile, and we'll continue to grow that number to 72 million this fall, which is a rapid escalation indeed. We made major investments in new rapid point-of-care tests. So we have—there's nothing like the rapid point, where you get your answer in 5 minutes to 15 minutes to maybe 20, 25 2 minutes at the max. And we're already at about a 50-percent level, and we're bringing it up very substantially from there. We're growing domestic production from less than 250,000 test kits per month in May to 8 million test kits per month. There is nothing like this that has ever taken place anywhere in the world or close. Through our partnership with Puritan Manufacturing in the State of Maine—a great State— we've increased production of test swabs from 30 million per month in June to 56 million per month now. As you remember, I went to Maine; I went to the plant where they do this. It was incredible. It was a great experience. And we'll produce over 100 million swabs per month by January. We've dramatically ramped up production of materials needed for a vaccine and are on track to rapidly produce 100 million doses as soon as a vaccine is approved, which could be very, very soon, and 500 million doses shortly thereafter. So we'll have 500 million doses. And logistically, we're using our military, our great military—a group of people; their whole life is based around logistics and bringing things to and from locations—and they'll be able to take care of this locationally and bringing it where it has to go very, very quickly. They're all mobilized. It's been fully set up. A very, very talented general is in charge.