The audio:

02-26hhs-navarro

The transcript:

CS: Officials at the World Health Organization are now warning world governments to begin preparing for a pandemic, a pandemic. But here in the United States, the Trump administration has been caught flat-footed. The administration has no plan to deal with the Coronavirus, no plan, and seemingly no urgency to develop one. Even now after the virus has already become a worldwide health crisis with rapidly-growing economic risk, the Trump administration is scrambling to respond. We have a crisis, and the Trump administration is trying to build an airplane while already in mid-flight. The harsh fact of the matter is the Trump administration has shown towering and dangerous incompetence when it comes to the Coronavirus.

HH: Morning glory, America, bonjour hi, Canada, it’s Hugh Hewitt across the United States, 400 affiliates and across the globe listening at Hughhewitt.com. Welcome. I am joined by assistant to the President Peter Navarro, an old, old acquaintance from California days who of course is helping the President with trade and manufacturing issues in the West Wing. And Peter is also involved in the Coronavirus preparation. Peter Navarro, welcome, good to see you yesterday. What did you make of Chuck Schumer’s comments on the floor of the Senate? If he had made them before lunch yesterday, I would have asked you about them. But he made them in the afternoon.

PN: Cryin’ Chuck. Well, let’s see – no plan, no urgency. We have a plan. We’ve been moving in Trump time, which is to say as quickly as possible, since January 29 when the President courageously pulled down those flights from China. Let me lay the plan out for you, Hugh. And it’s a four-pronged strategy that we have to deal with. The first thing is on the front lines, the personal protective equipment that we need to have for our health professionals, folks in nursing facilities, things like that. What are that? That’s the gloves, that’s the goggles, that’s Tyvek suits. It’s the masks, the N95 masks. The second thing that we need are treatment options. The third is the vaccine development, and the fourth is the point of care diagnostics. Hugh, we’ve been moving very rapidly on all four fronts. Today, for example, on the personal equipment front, HHS is putting out a half a billion dollar proposal to rapidly get manufacturers of face masks in to get that done. If you look at the treatment options, this is what’s interesting, Hugh. If somebody gets Corona, and they’re moderately to severely infected, there’s, first of all, there’s a drug called Remdesivir. It’s made by Gilead. What we’ve done there are a number of things. First of all, we’ve secured the 4,500 doses that they have. In addition, as a cost of almost $200 million, we’re moving to secure the other 90,000 doses they have in involved material. Now the Chinese have been famously uncooperative, so what we’re doing with that drug is going to clinical trials in Japan as well as in Nebraska, where we have some patients. And we’re hoping that within 60 days, we’ll have an idea whether that drug’s efficacious. Secondly, on the treatment front, and this is really interesting, Hugh, there’s a couple of thousand drugs that have been FDA-approved that we’re going to sequentially and rapidly screen to see if they have any efficacy. And the good news about these, this process is they’re already FDA-approved. So if we find something, we can quickly get that to the American people. As a third treatment, there’s something called monoclonal antibodies. Basically what they do when you inject them as a serum, they strengthen the immune system of a patient, and they slow down the rate of proliferation in the body of the virus. There’s a company called Regeneron, and again, we’re working closely with them on the treatment option. If you move to the vaccine development…

HH: Can I ask you a question in between before the vaccine?

PN: Sure. Absolutely.

HH: The respirators came up with Alex Azar yesterday.

PN: Yes. This is important.

HH: In The Great Influenza by John Barry, he said that is one of the big gaps in 1918 and today is that we lack sufficient numbers of respirators. Are you in charge of that supply chain as well?

PN: Yeah, one of the things, the first thing I did, Hugh, was ask the question what do we need to treat a Corona patient. So let me walk through that. There’s 30 different elements. If you have somebody who’s moderately to severely infected, you’re likely going to have to use a ventilator to intubate them. So in order to do that, you obviously have to have these ventilators. But you also have to have the bronchodilators. You have to have the drugs you use for sedation and induction. When you intubate a patient, that raises the possibility of secondary bacteria infections. So you need a bunch of antibiotics. And interestingly enough, you need a whole suite of them, because depending on where, what region of the country people live in, one antibiotic might be better than another. In addition to that, when you put somebody on a sedation to intubate them, you can also have blood pressure issues. So you need hypertensive impresser agents. And finally, in some cases, a small percent, there’s going to be renal failure issues. So you need that. So what I found immediately in looking at this, Hugh, was just how dependent we are on foreign supplies for just about all of our medical supply, medical equipment, and pharmaceutical chain. And it’s China a lot, but it’s also India and Europe. And I would note here just parenthetically that we have no friends our allies when there’s a crisis like this. Back when we had the Swine flu in 2009, our, one of our best friends, Australia, refused to send us 35 million doses of a vaccine and kept them for their own people. And we had similar problems with the UK and Canada.

HH: Again, that was noted by John Barry. In the middle of a health crisis, all countries hoard. And so I want to come back to that when it comes to a vaccine.

PN: Yeah.

HH: But I’m talking with Peter Navarro if you’re just joining us, assistant to the President for trade and manufacturing. Do you believe Team Trump is 100% poised and ready, and in fact deployed? And do you believe it needs any kind of uptick in visibility? I wrote for the Post I would put the Vice President in charge of making statements every day. Do you think the CDC is adequately communicating information?

PN: Well, let’s look at what we’re doing. We have a task force that meets on a daily basis. This is fairly unprecedented in an administration. At the same time the task force meets at the principal level, there’s a deputy level task force that meets every day as well. So if you ask if we’re poised to do what we need to do, the answer is yes. Every day, we’re moving on these four different fronts that I described. I think that you know, Azar is the lead face of this. Fauci’s out there talking about the health issues. And as this develops, certainly we need to communicate more about exactly what’s going on.

HH: Now Larry Kudlow went on yesterday and gave a great interview on CNBC. He noted that the human suffering is tragic, but he did not see any economic downside to this. Do you agree with Larry Kudlow’s analysis?

PN: I think that we need to see how this unfolds. There’s a couple dimensions to this, Hugh. First of all, I think if we learned anything in the trade negotiations with China, it’s that our economy can be very, very strong in the presence of tariffs and reduced imports from China. So the fact that China is struggling is not likely to materially harm this economy. The bigger issue is how that’s going to ripple through in the supply chains for everything else, just not pharmaceuticals. So we’re looking at that really carefully. The focus, I think, needs to be at this point is making sure we have everything we need in order to address this crisis. And vaccine development…

HH: Yeah, go back to vaccine for the last minute, yeah.

PN: Yeah. So what we have there is a four company horse race, to mix metaphors, multiple shots on goal. And what we’ve done is lay out a roadmap to get a vaccine if we are able to score on that in half the time, Hugh, that’s usually done. And you do that through a combination of synergies in the private sector in terms of how they usually operate, and streamlining the regulations without harming safety prospects. So…

HH: So Chuck Schumer, to just wrap up, Schumer is just wrong, Peter Navarro? He’s just wrong?

PN: He’s flat-out wrong. I mean, if you sat, if you interviewed him and me, he’d just mouth a bunch of partisan slogans. And I would do what I just did, was tell you in granular detail everything we’re doing under the President’s leadership from day one and let your listeners decide.

HH: And so Tom Cotton said yesterday every conversation he’s had with the President for the last month has involved Coronavirus. Is that the same with you, Peter Navarro, when you meet with the President?

PN: Yes, indeed. He’s, this is a hands-on president. As I said, January 29, he took a courageous decision to take those planes down from China. He was widely criticized. It’s genius in hindsight. It’s exactly what we needed to do. So…

HH: Peter Navarro, assistant to the president for trade manufacturing, thanks. Come back. Keep us posted on Coronavirus. And I hope the visibility of the administration effort gets higher, not lower.

End of interview.