President Trump acknowledged Wednesday that he intentionally played down the deadly nature of the rapidly spreading coronavirus last winter as an attempt to avoid a “frenzy,” part of an escalating damage-control effort by his top advisers to contain the fallout from a forthcoming book by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward.

Trump’s comments came hours after excerpts from the book and audio of some of the 18 separate interviews he conducted with the author were released, fueling a sense of outrage over the president’s blunt description of knowing that he was not telling the truth about a virus that has killed nearly 190,000 Americans.

President Trump acknowledged Wednesday that he intentionally played down the deadly nature of the rapidly spreading coronavirus last winter as an attempt to avoid a “frenzy,” part of an escalating damage-control effort by his top advisers to contain the fallout from a forthcoming book by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward.

Trump’s comments came hours after excerpts from the book and audio of some of the 18 separate interviews he conducted with the author were released, fueling a sense of outrage over the president’s blunt description of knowing that he was not telling the truth about a virus that has killed nearly 190,000 Americans.

Democrats, led by presidential nominee Joe Biden, denounced Trump’s actions as part of a deliberate effort to lie to the public for his own political purposes when other world leaders took decisive action to warn their people and set those nations on a better path to handling the pandemic….

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President Trump, faced with multiple crises and falling poll numbers less than five months before the presidential election, is prodding top health officials to move faster on a historically ambitious timeline to approve a coronavirus vaccine by year’s end.

The goal is to instill confidence among voters that the virus can be tamed and the economy fully reopened under Trump’s stewardship.

President Trump, faced with multiple crises and falling poll numbers less than five months before the presidential election, is prodding top health officials to move faster on a historically ambitious timeline to approve a coronavirus vaccine by year’s end.

The goal is to instill confidence among voters that the virus can be tamed and the economy fully reopened under Trump’s stewardship.

In a meeting last month with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar — who is overseeing the effort called Operation Warp Speed, along with Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper — Trump pushed Azar repeatedly to speed up the already unprecedented timeline, according to two senior White House officials familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Trump wants some people to be able to get the vaccine sooner than the end of the year to demonstrate an end to the pandemic is within reach, according to those officials and two others….

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U.S. deaths from covid-19 passed 60,000 on Wednesday, a figure President Trump had once projected would be the upper limit, as hopes rose for a drug treatment that the top U.S. infectious-disease expert said has shown a clear benefit in an early trial.

Trump welcomed the promising early signs that an experimental antiviral drug, remdesivir, can be effective in speeding the recovery time for covid-19 patients.

U.S. deaths from covid-19 passed 60,000 on Wednesday, a figure President Trump had once projected would be the upper limit, as hopes rose for a drug treatment that the top U.S. infectious-disease expert said has shown a clear benefit in an early trial.

Trump welcomed the promising early signs that an experimental antiviral drug, remdesivir, can be effective in speeding the recovery time for covid-19 patients.

“The data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery,” Anthony S. Fauci said alongside Trump at the White House on Wednesday. “That is really quite important.”

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci leads, is overseeing a study of more than 1,000 patients in the United States and around the world….

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In a desperate bid to find treatments for people sickened by the coronavirus, doctors and drug companies have launched more than 100 human experiments in the United States, investigating experimental drugs, a decades-old malaria medicine and cutting-edge therapies that have worked for other conditions such as HIV and rheumatoid arthritis.

In a desperate bid to find treatments for people sickened by the coronavirus, doctors and drug companies have launched more than 100 human experiments in the United States, investigating experimental drugs, a decades-old malaria medicine and cutting-edge therapies that have worked for other conditions such as HIV and rheumatoid arthritis.

Development of effective treatments for covid-19, the disease the virus causes, would be one of the most significant milestones in returning the United States to normalcy. But the massive effort is disorganized and scattershot, harming its prospects for success, according to multiple researchers and health experts. Researchers working around-the-clock describe a lack of a centralized national strategy, overlapping efforts, an array of small-scale trials that will not lead to definitive answers and no standards for how to prioritize efforts, what data to collect or how to share it to get to answers faster.

“It’s a cacophony — it’s not an orchestra. There’s no conductor,” said Derek Angus, chair of the department of critical care medicine at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, who is leading a covid-19 trial that will test multiple therapies. “My heart aches over the complete chaos in the response….”

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The Senate on Wednesday unanimously approved a roughly $2.2 trillion stimulus package to address the economic impact of the coronavirus, pushing through one of the largest pieces of legislation in the modern history of Congress as the nation braces for the deepening impact of the outbreak.

The bill is aimed primarily at addressing the economic calamity that’s unfolding because of shutdowns intended to slow the spread of the outbreak, with analysts making dire predictions about soaring unemployment claims and economic contraction.

The Senate on Wednesday unanimously approved a roughly $2.2 trillion stimulus package to address the economic impact of the coronavirus, pushing through one of the largest pieces of legislation in the modern history of Congress as the nation braces for the deepening impact of the outbreak.

The bill is aimed primarily at addressing the economic calamity that’s unfolding because of shutdowns intended to slow the spread of the outbreak, with analysts making dire predictions about soaring unemployment claims and economic contraction.

The legislation takes a multipronged approach to confronting the mounting crisis. It contains a number of measures aimed directly at helping workers, including stimulus checks for millions of Americans, and others to shore up the government safety net, with provisions such as more food stamp spending and more robust unemployment insurance benefits….

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