Remarks by Trump, Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing, 04-24-2020

[mahatmakanejeeves]

This is a placeholder. It's Sunday morning, and there's still no transcript. Maybe Trump is still holding his breath until we give in. Let's put these here until then.

The White House tried to move a CNN reporter to the back of the press room, but she refused. Then Trump walked out. Something I wrote:

Link to tweet

Trump cut briefing short after reporters turned away White House attempt to swap their seats

The incident appeared to be an attempt to punish CNN and its correspondent, Kaitlan Collins, who stayed in her assigned seat after a White House official tried to get her to move to the back.

By Paul Farhi

[samnsara]

1. haha Im sure no one is buying that or even cares..

...but good for Kailan!

[mahatmakanejeeves]

2. Hey, they finally got around to posting a transcript.

REMARKS

Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing

HEALTHCARE

Issued on: April 27, 2020

James S. Brady Press Briefing Room

April 24, 2020
5:39 P.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you. We continue to see evidence that our aggressive strategy is working and working at a very high level. Nationwide, the percent of tests that come back positive has declined very significantly.

{snip}

The whole world is watching us. You have 184 countries out there that have been hit, and now it’s probably higher than that. But they’re all watching us. They’re all watching and they’re calling, and they respect what we’re doing, so much.

I spoke with the leaders of numerous countries today. They’re asking if we can send them ventilators, and I’m agreeing to do it. We have tremendous capacity — now, over-capacity of ventilators. We’re filling up stockpiles for our states and for ourselves. The federal government has over 10,000 ventilators, and we could have a lot more if we wanted to do that. But we’re helping Mexico, Honduras, Indonesia, France. We’re sending to France. We’re sending to Spain. We’re sending to Italy. And we’ll probably be sending to Germany, should they need them.

Over the last three years, we built the strongest economy and the most successful country the world has ever seen. Greatest economy the world has ever seen. Nobody has ever done anything like what we were able to do.

{snip}

Thank you very much. Stephen, please.

DR. HAHN: Thank you, Mr. President. I appreciate the opportunity to tell you about what’s happening at the FDA. We have a team of more than 18,000 employees, including 10,000 scientists, doctors, pharmacists, and nurses, and they’ve been working around the clock because, as you probably know, many of the medical products that are being used for the COVID-19 outbreak are, in fact, regulated by FDA. The staff have been hard at work authorizing tests and other medical products.

As part of these efforts to support diagnostic test development during this global pandemic, the President has asked us, and under his leadership, to actually cut down as many barriers as we possibly could to get medical products into the medical community, and we have done that, of course recognizing the urgency of the situation.

{snip}

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much.

END

6:01 P.M. EDT

[mahatmakanejeeves]

3. We got a bit of footage of the White House trying to reassign seats before Friday night's briefing:

We got a bit of footage of the White House trying to reassign seats before Friday night’s briefing:

Link to tweet