MORRISVILLE, N.C. _ With coronavirus cases in North Carolina passing 112,000 since the pandemic first hit the state in March, President Donald Trump will visit a Research Triangle Park company that is helping manufacture one of the more promising vaccine candidates for COVID-19.
Fujifilm Diosynth is manufacturing a vaccine for the biotech company Novavax, which was awarded $1.6 billion from the federal government as part of an effort to speed up coronavirus vaccine development.
Trump is expected to tout the effort _ called Operation Warp Speed _ during his tour of the company on Monday afternoon.
The Novavax candidate is already in Phase 1 trials and the company anticipates moving into a larger Phase 2 study next month. The final Phase 3 trial would come sometime in the fall. Novavax has been in business for 33 years, but has yet to bring a product to market, The New York Times reported.
Inside its facilities in RTP, Fujifilm Diosynth has already begun manufacturing the main component for the protein-based vaccine candidate, named NVX-CoV2373. The batches of the vaccine created in North Carolina would be used in the Phase 3 trial, which would include up to 30,000 subjects, the company said in a release.
"I think this will certainly be the quickest I've ever seen us (do) it," the company's CEO Martin Meeson told The News & Observer last week.
Meeson added that work that normally would have taken months has been reduced to weeks.
Fujifilm has more than 500 employees based in RTP, and its facilities there go back to the mid-1990s.
The visit comes after the United States surpassed 4 million coronavirus cases Thursday and more than 146,000 people in the country have died. In North Carolina, more than 1,700 people have died.
Trump announced Operation Warp Speed in April, a public-private venture to deliver 300 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine by January 2021. The administration is pushing for the production of vaccines as they work their way through clinical trials _ not waiting until one is approved _ so that the vaccine will be ready for distribution almost immediately after finishing clinical trials.
"We cannot afford to lose even one day," Peter Navarro, the administration's Defense Production Act policy coordinator, told the N&O of the effort.
It will be Trump's first visit to the state since he canceled a portion of the Republican National Convention in Jacksonville, Florida, due to safety concerns caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Trump had moved the RNC from Charlotte to Florida after North Carolina would not guarantee a full crowd at the Spectrum Center due to the coronavirus.
A scaled-down business portion of the RNC is still expected to happen next month in Charlotte, but the president is not expected to attend, The Charlotte Observer reported.
An NBC News/Marist poll taken between July 14 and 22, which was before Trump's cancelation of the Jacksonville events, found that just 32% of North Carolina voters believed state leaders were wrong to insist on safety protocols for the Charlotte convention.
That same poll, released Monday by NBC News/Marist, also found that Trump is currently trailing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden by 7 percentage points in North Carolina.
The poll found that among the state's registered voters, Biden received 51% support compared with 44% for Trump in a head-to-head matchup. The margin of error for the poll was 4 percentage points.
In March, the NBC poll reported former vice president had a 4-point advantage against the president.
Biden issued a statement Monday about Trump's visit. "As COVID-19 cases in North Carolina continue to rise, North Carolinians deserve better than the inaction we have seen from President Trump and his administration," Biden said. "The magnitude of this crisis was preventable. Yet Donald Trump has failed to take accountability for his shameful response and instead placed blame on everyone but his own administration."
The Republican National Committee, in its own news release, criticized Biden's record on public health as part of the Obama administration and said that, "President Trump is leading an all hands on deck response to Coronavirus from testing, to supplies, to vaccines."
Across all polls taken in North Carolina, Biden had an average lead of 3 percentage points, according to RealClearPolitics.
