WARREN, Mich. (AP) — More than 130,000 autoworkers returned to factories across the U.S. for the first time in nearly two months Monday in one of the biggest steps yet to restart American industry, while an experimental vaccine against the coronavirus yielded encouraging results in a small and extremely early test.
At a Fiat Chrysler pickup truck assembly plant in Warren, outside Detroit, workers entered a giant white tent with a sign that read: “Let’s restart and keep each other safe.”
Detroit’s Big Three — Fiat Chrysler, General Motors and Ford — as well as Honda and Toyota all had screening procedures in place at dozens of factories that reopened from the Great Lakes states south to Tennessee and Texas and out west at Tesla’s factory near the San Francisco Bay.
Chinese President Xi Jinping defended China’s record, saying the country provided all relevant outbreak data to WHO and other countries, including the virus’s genetic sequence, “in a most timely fashion.”
But the Trump administration stepped up its attacks at the meeting, with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar accusing WHO of failing to obtain the information the world needed as the outbreak emerged.
