President Donald Trump will deliver remarks on Friday about his administration’s efforts to have a coronavirus vaccine developed and distributed, dubbed Operation Warp Speed.
Trump was scheduled to speak in the Rose Garden at 4 p.m. ET, according to the White House. But the president tweeted at 4:07 p.m. that the presser would begin “in 15 minutes.”
The event will mark Trump’s first in-person public remarks in a week, and his first since NBC and other news outlets projected that Joe Biden won the presidential election.
The update on Operation Warp Speed also comes five days after pharma giant Pfizer and German biotech company BioNTech announced that their leading vaccine candidate is more than 90% effective against Covid-19, based on preliminary phase three tests.
Trump had celebrated that breakthrough in an all-caps tweet, declaring it “SUCH GREAT NEWS” that the vaccine is “COMING SOON.”
President-elect Biden offered a more measured response, noting that it would still be months before a vaccine could be distributed throughout the country.
Trump, without evidence, later accused the Food and Drug Administration of withholding the vaccine results until after the election in order to hurt his chances against Biden.
Trump has refused to concede the election to Biden. For days, Trump has falsely claimed he won the contest and has floated an array of unsupported conspiracies about widespread fraud, despite assurances from his own administration that no such fraud exists.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign’s efforts to challenge states’ election results in court suffered multiple setbacks earlier Friday. The campaign dropped a legal challenge in Arizona, and a judge in Michigan denied a request to block that state from certifying its election results. In Pennsylvania, the state that put Biden over the top, Commonwealth Secretary Kathy Boockvar announced that she would not order a recount of the ballots.
NBC projected Friday that Biden would win Georgia’s race, netting the Democrat 16 more electoral votes and flipping a state that has reliably voted for the GOP’s presidential nominee for decades. Trump will win North Carolina, NBC also projected Friday afternoon.
