Gasparino says White House hopeful for coronavirus vaccine 'before the November elections'
President knows unemployment must drop below 10 percent for any chance of reelection, FBN correspondent says
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Fox Business Network senior correspondent Charlie Gasparino told the "Fox News Rundown" podcast Friday that President Trump "knows he has to get unemployment down below 10 percent" if he is to have any hope of winning reelection in November.
"I also think he needs -- and this is what's coming out of the White House, at least from what I hear -- they are talking like they think they can get it down below 10 percent and they believe they can get maybe a [coronavirus] vaccine out before the November elections," Gasparino told host Jessica Rosenthal. "And that will spur the economy even more. I mean, that's kind of their game plan from what I understand, internally."
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Gasparino added that "if somehow these viral rates come down a little bit [and] the economy picks up, Donald Trump could have a fairly strong message going into the election, where Joe Biden wants to raise taxes dramatically, wants all this big government stuff which clearly will reverse a lot of the trends that Trump put in place before the pandemic hit ... He [Trump] doesn't have a lot of time. But, you know, the economy could pick up."
Turning to the ongoing pandemic and its effect on consumer confidence, Gasparino said that Americans are more hopeful about engaging in the economy because the “death rate is going down.”
"My brother runs Brooklyn Hospital [Center], the ICU," he said. “There are more ways to keep people alive right now. What they didn’t know in March, they know now. People are coming off of ventilators more now. Back in March, when you were out of a ventilator, that was the kiss of death with COVID. It's not quite the case right now."
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"So people are living now," Gasparino went on. "The real sort of battle right now is to make sure people follow certain rules to sort of keep this thing ... if people are going to get sick, at a modest rate and make sure older people don't get it and, you know, that can be done. That is not rocket science, and that's why people are hopeful. There are simple ways to deal with this that could work."
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"That doesn't mean everybody should go partying and, you know, go to raves," Gasparino told Rosenthal, "but it's just ways of dealing with your life that's a little bit inconvenient, but not the worst thing in the world."
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