COVID-19 scare: Trump calls himself a 'war-time President,' promises to rush with development of vaccines

Assuming the title of a resolute wartime president fighting an "invisible enemy," US President Donald Trump on Thursday assured Americans that his administration has been rushing up with the development of vaccines to fight the killer corona bug.

According to The New York Times, Trump said that his administration had "slashed red tape" to develop vaccines and therapies "as fast as it can possibly be done" and scaling access to treatments that had shown promise, despite the fact that many of the treatments are in their early stages.

Food and Drug Administration commissioner Stephen Hahn, White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx, and surgeon general Jerome Adams, who joined the President during the briefing, repeated an announcement from earlier this week that human testing on a vaccine trial had begun, and said that the government would be pursuing more antiviral therapies to treat the virus.

"Essentially we're looking at things to make people better, or at the earliest stages they didn't even know they had it," Trump said.

"I've directed the F.D.A. to eliminate outdated rules and bureaucracy so this work can proceed rapidly, quickly, and I mean fast," he added.

The Trump administration has been under immense pressure to increase testing capacity as cases of coronavirus soar in the United States. More than 2,700 new cases were reported in the US in the 24 hours from Wednesday morning to Thursday morning. In total, more than 10,200 people across the country have tested positive for the virus, as of late Thursday morning. At least 152 have died, CNN reported.