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The rush to produce a vaccine comes as the number of known cases in the U.S. has passed 1 million and the death toll has topped 70,000, with more infections and deaths projected as states across the country begin to loosen strict social-distancing guidelines in the coming months.

Trump on Tuesday continued to defend his administration’s early actions during the crisis, and his own personal downplaying of the virus’ threat.

Asked why, at the end of February, he asserted that the 15 known cases of coronavirus in the U.S. would quickly go down to zero, the president again fell back on his usual defenses of touting his decision to restrict travel from China a month earlier. He noted that those comments came while flights were still allowed into the country from Europe, another hot spot for the pandemic.

And Trump reiterated his wish to be a “cheerleader” for the country.

“I don’t want to be Mr. Gloom-and-Doom. It’s a very bad subject,” he said on ABC, though he acknowledged that his administration was still unsure of the severity of the outbreak. “I’m not looking to tell the American people when nobody really knows what’s happening yet, ‘Oh, this is going to be so tragic.’”

Even so, confronted by Muir with his varying prognostications of the U.S. death toll, the president insisted that he’d “always felt” that number would range from 60,000 to 70,000, but again pointed to models that showed as many as 2 million dead without mitigation efforts.