Trump to visit North Carolina biotech company, discuss vaccine efforts Monday
President Donald Trump will visit the Triangle on Monday, his 10th trip to North Carolina as president.
Trump will tour the Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies’ Innovation Center in Morrisville, according to a White House official. The company does pharmaceutical manufacturing.
He is expected to talk about the push to develop a COVID-19 vaccine and accelerate manufacturing and distribution once it is developed.
Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies said of its company “for over 30 years our focus has been on supporting our customers with the development and manufacture of recombinant proteins, viral vaccines and gene therapies.”
The company is manufacturing drug substance for NVX-CoV2373, Novavax’ COVID-19 vaccine candidate. Novavax started its Phase 1 clinical trial in May.
In early July, the federal government announced a $1.6 billion agreement with Novavax to demonstrate commercial-scale manufacturing of the possible vaccine. The government will own 100 million doses of the vaccine as a result, according to the federal government.
The United States surpassed 4 million coronavirus cases Thursday and more than 143,000 people have died in the country. In North Carolina, there have been more than 106,000 cases since March and more than 1,700 people have died.
It will be Trump’s first visit to the state since he moved the bulk of the Republican National Convention from Charlotte to Jacksonville, Florida.
Trump announced Thursday evening that he is canceling the Jacksonville portion of the convention due to safety issues caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
He had moved the convention after Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, would not “guarantee” the Republicans could have a full arena without social distancing and face coverings for Trump’s acceptance speech for the late August event. Trump said Thursday the nominating portion of the convention will still take place in Charlotte.
“The delegates are going to get together, that’s where they do their nomination,” he said. “We’re going to do a fairly reasonably quick meeting in North Carolina, the nomination.”
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This story was originally published July 23, 2020 at 4:54 PM.
