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President Trump and Vice President Pence hit the road on Monday to highlight progress on the development of a vaccine for COVID-19, seeking to project optimism about the administration's response to a pandemic that has killed more than 145,000 people in the U.S. Trump visited a biotech facility [in Morrisville, N.C.] to boast of the rapid progress on finding a vaccine to combat the pandemic, claiming his administration’s work through its vaccine development effort, Operation Warp Speed, had reduced the wait time by “years.” (Samuels, 7/27)

China’s “bat woman” lashed out at Donald Trump, saying the U.S. president owes her country an apology as she again denied assertions that the novel coronavirus is linked to the Wuhan lab where she works. Shi Zhengli, deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said in an interview published in Science magazine that she and her colleagues encountered the virus in December last year, when reports of the disease first emerged in the city. She said the lab hadn’t seen or studied the virus before that. (Sutherland, 7/28)

The positive messaging from the White House coronavirus task force doesn't always match the reality on the ground, Anthony Fauci says in a new interview with ABC News. In the interview, which is set to air Tuesday, Fauci says he doesn't have a "good answer" as to why the U.S. is still struggling with distributing personal protective equipment or why diagnostic test results are taking so long to turn around. “We keep hearing when we go to these task force meetings that these [issues] are being corrected,” Fauci said. “But yet when you go into the trenches, you still hear about that.” (Weixel, 7/27)

President Donald Trump socially distanced himself from his own national security adviser on Monday after he tested positive for Covid-19. Asked about the positive test result for Robert O’Brien, Trump said he hadn't seen his top foreign policy aide recently. "I haven't seen him lately," the president said on Monday during a brief exchange with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House. "I heard he tested, yeah. I have not seen him." (Lippman, 7/27)