Coronavirus news: US daily death toll shoots back up over 1,000

President Donald Trump spent most of his opening remarks during a press briefing Thursday giving a campaign-style speech listing off what he views as accomplishments, while appearing to tout misleading coronavirus statistics.

He also compared his handling of the ongoing crisis to then-President Barack Obama and Joe Biden's handling of the H1N1, or swine flu, pandemic in 2009, which he called a disaster.

"The United States has done really well," Trump said as he ran through a series of statistics and numbers meant to make the U.S. look comparatively better than other countries.

Trump also accused Biden of launching a campaign to spread anti-vaxxer sentiments about a COVID-19 vaccine without providing any evidence to support the claim.

"Joe Biden continues to use the pandemic for political gain," Trump said. "Now Biden's launched a public campaign against the vaccine, which is so bad, because we have some vaccines coming that are incredible."

"Deaths declined by 20% compared to just last week," Trump said. "It's going down very rapidly, really rapidly."

This data does not reflect the fact that reporting over Labor Day was delayed and health experts have not signaled that deaths are decreasing "very rapidly."

The International Air Transport Association said it urged governments to begin to carefully plan with industry stakeholders "to ensure full preparedness when vaccines for COVID-19 are approved and available for distribution." It also warned about "potentially severe capacity" constraints when transporting vaccines by air.

"Safely delivering COVID-19 vaccines will be the mission of the century for the global air cargo industry. But it won’t happen without careful advance planning. And the time for that is now," IATA Director General and CEO Alexandre de Juniac said in a statement. "We urge governments to take the lead in facilitating cooperation across the logistics chain so that the facilities, security arrangements and border processes are ready for the mammoth and complex task ahead."

The association acknowledged "delivering billions of doses of vaccine to the entire world efficiently" will involve "hugely complex logistical and programmatic obstacles."

"We look forward to working together with government, vaccine manufacturers and logistical partners to ensure an efficient global roll-out of a safe and affordable COVID-19 vaccine,” the association said.

FDA Chief Stephen Hahn reiterated on Thursday that any FDA decision on a COVID-19 vaccine will be based on the science and data from clinical trials.

Hahn said the career experts in FDA's Center for Biologics Research make decisions on whether to recommend vaccines for approval and he has no plan to contradict them.

"I can tell you throughout this pandemic, throughout my tenure as commissioner, I have not reversed a decision by the career scientists on medical products and I have no intention of doing that now," he said, adding, "We will independently call the balls and strikes."

He responded to concerns the FDA would speed up or slow down vaccine authorizations to impact the election.

"[W]e find ourselves in the position that we're accused of either going too fast or too slow or doing too little or too much. And I suppose, where we land up is if we're hearing criticism from both sides, we're probably in the right place," Hahn said. "At the end of the day, for us, it's about the risk benefit calculus, particularly during a pandemic like COVID-19, and we do need to call the balls and strikes on medical products and we do need to use the available data."

Adm. Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health & Human Services, said he has never been told to slow down coronavirus testing amid reports that President Donald Trump had purposely downplayed the threat of coronavirus back in March.

Speaking with CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Thursday, Giroir said he has “never been told to slow down testing, or to reduce our efforts,” responding to a question about the president’s reported remarks.

“And in fact, we built on testing every single month and I think where we are right now is really an inflection point,” Giroir said.

He added that the country is at “an inflection point” with testing, noting that “this month, we should have the availability of over 100 million tests, and between 55% and 60% of those -- that's 55 to 60 million -- will be rapid point of care.”