President Trump is ready to go to war with the coronavirus, according to Sen. Lindsey Graham.
The South Carolina Republican said he just got off the phone with Trump before doing an interview on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show on Thursday.
“Basically, we’re going to counterattack the virus,” Graham said after Hannity mentioned his discussion with the president.
“We’re going to starve it. We’re going to bomb it. And we’re going to kill it. The way you starve it is you stop human-to-human transmission. Social distancing will starve the virus. The way you bomb it is drug therapies that you were talking about, we’re going to bomb the hell out of it. We’re going to take it from a 10 to hopefully to a 1 or 2, and eventually we’re going to kill it with a vaccine,” Graham added.
Graham’s war imagery echoed the description employed by Trump, who, on Wednesday, described himself as a “wartime president” as he summoned the sacrifices made during the Second World War to call on Americans to pull together to secure a “total victory” over the coronavirus pandemic.
The president announced Thursday that the Food and Drug Administration would soon introduce new coronavirus therapies, including a drug used to treat malaria called chloroquine, which researchers think could prove an effective treatment for the coronavirus. Still, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that vaccines are in early testing phases and will likely be in trials for at least another year.
Graham also touted the promise of a $1 trillion stimulus plan to combat the economic damage caused by the effort to control the coronavirus.
“We’re going to stabilize the economy and make sure you get income coming from the fact you have lost your job to no fault of your own but the containment policies that will pay dividends, we are paying for them now,” he said.
There have been around 245,500 confirmed coronavirus cases around the world, 86,035 recoveries, and 10,031 deaths, according to the latest reading by the Johns Hopkins University tracker. In the United States, there have been 14,250 cases, 121 recoveries, and 205 deaths.
