Hey guys, this is Mike from San Antonio, Texas, where me and my daughter, Matilda, are socially distancing ourselves.

And she is making mushroom soup. It looks like this butt guess was recorded at.

2.11 pm on Thursday March 19th. Okay, here's the show. Mushroom soup made by Kid. I feel like we all have our own stories of socially distancing and how difficult it is when you've got a random kid around you.

Yeah, just so I get I get a lot of at least they're being helpful. They're making something. I get a lot I get asked to make stuff.

I'm a where's my juice. Well, hey there. It is the NPR politics podcast. I must look at it. I'm covering the presidential campaign and I'm IE Shirasco. I cover the White House.

In what seems to be turning into a daily tradition in the time of coronavirus, President Trump just held a press conference earlier today to discuss the administration's latest efforts to deal with the pandemic.

And what seemed most newsworthy to me, IE Shirasco was this announcement that President made about drugs to treat the coronavirus, but walk us through this because it doesn't sound like we have an immediate cure.

There certainly isn't a cure for the coronavirus at the moment, but he what President Trump and he's kind of been trumpeting this since yesterday that there was going to be this big FDA announcement.

And today what he came out with what he basically said was that the FDA is working to get these drugs out that could potentially help with treatment of people who have the virus, maybe make it less severe or things of that nature.

And then President Trump as his way, he talked about it in this way, like we're going to have these drugs. One of the drugs is already available, but it's not for treatment of the coronavirus.

It's an anti-malarial drug and it has been around. And so there's this idea that this might be possible to be used to help with the treatment of this virus.

The nice part is it's been around for a long time. So we know that if things don't go as planned, it's not going to kill anybody.

When you go with a brand new drug, you don't know that that's going to happen. You have to see and you have to go long tests. But this has been used in different forms, very powerful drug in different forms.

It's shown very encouraging, very, very encouraging early results. And we're going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately.

So after Trump made all these comments, Stephen Hahn, the FDA commissioner, quickly came in and basically he threw a little bit of cold water on it.

Make sure that the sea of new treatments will get the right drug to the right patient at the right dosage at the right time.

As an example, we may have the right drug, but it may not be in the appropriate dosage form right now. And that may do more harm than good.

Those are the things that that's our job to look at. And that's why it's really important we have these dedicated professionals looking at these aspects of therapeutic development.

He said that yes, these drugs exist. But the FDA has to go through a process to make sure they're safe. They have to go through clinical trials.

You can't just give them to people for treatment of this new virus without knowing the actual effects that it could have.

So Aisha, did they outline a timeline for this? Because you know, my understanding is drugs have to go through multiple phases for a clinical trial before they can generally be used by the public.

So they're going through this continuous process. Hans said it might take three to six months. I mean, so that's better than the vaccine, which probably won't be complete for about a year at least.

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