Covid-19 Live Updates: Biden Suggests Every American Could Be Offered Vaccine by August
President Biden struck an optimistic tone, predicting “we’ll be in a very different circumstance” by next Christmas. And vaccine supply is increasing to 13.5 million doses a week, the White House said.
President Biden said on Tuesday that every American who wanted a Covid-19 vaccination would be able to get one by the end of July, striking a more optimistic tone than he delivered last week when he warned that logistical and distribution hurdles would most likely mean that many people would still not have been vaccinated by the end of the summer.
Mr. Biden made the comment in Milwaukee during a town-hall-style meeting hosted by CNN. When the host, Anderson Cooper, asked him when every American who wanted a vaccine was “going to be able to get a vaccine” Mr. Biden replied without hesitation: “By the end of July this year.”
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He then qualified the remark slightly, telling Mr. Cooper that the doses would “be available” by then. But he also said he did not expect it to take months to get the shots into people’s arms.
At a time when Americans are yearning to get back to what life was like before the pandemic, Mr. Biden sought to offer reassurance tempered with reality.
While the president said he did not want to “overpromise,” he said at one point that “by next Christmas I think we’ll be in a very different circumstance, God willing, than we are today.” At another point he predicted that by the time the next school year starts in September, the nation would be “significantly better off than we are today.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued guidelines that urge school districts to reopen as soon as possible if they follow safety precautions.
Last week, the Biden administration said it had secured 200 million more doses of coronavirus vaccines, enough to inoculate every American adult. The additional doses amount to a 50 percent increase in supply, and will give the administration enough in total to cover 300 million people by the end of the summer.
But Mr. Biden warned at the time that it would still be difficult to get those shots into people’s arms. “It’s one thing to have the vaccine,” Mr. Biden said then. “It’s another thing to have vaccinators.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Biden used his bully pulpit to urge Americans to get vaccinated, addressing questions about the efficacy of the vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson, which has not yet been granted emergency authorization by the Food and Drug Administration. That vaccine has been shown to be slightly less efficacious against some of the more contagious variants of the coronavirus than the two vaccines already in use, one by Moderna and other by Pfizer BioNTech. Mr. Biden said Americans needed to take it if it was offered.
“The clear notion is if you’re eligible, if it’s available, get the vaccine,” he said. “Get the vaccine.”
As winter storms threatened to upend distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, the White House on Tuesday said that states collectively would begin receiving 13.5 million doses each week — a jump of more than two million doses due in part to a shift in the way the government is allocating doses of Pfizer’s vaccine. And Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said that a new federal pharmacy program would provide two million weekly doses, a doubling of its initial supply.
The increases were welcome developments for state officials desperate to inoculate more vulnerable Americans before more contagious variants of virus become dominant.
The Biden administration has been working with Pfizer, the maker of one federally authorized vaccine, to get the company more manufacturing supplies, including pumps and filtration units, through the Defense Production Act. The administration announced last week that Pfizer and Moderna, the other maker of the vaccine authorized in the United States, would be able to deliver a total of 400 million doses by the end of May, well ahead of schedule.
The latest boost in supply came partly because Pfizer, as of this week, is getting credit for six doses instead of five doses per vial, a White House spokesman said. Two-thirds of the boost came from increased output, the spokesman said. Officials now say there is an ample supply of the specialized syringes needed to extract the extra Pfizer dose. The White House warned state officials last week that because of that accounting change, the number of doses that the federal government said it had delivered would shoot up, even if the amount of vaccine in each vial did not.
Ms. Psaki told reporters on Tuesday that with the latest increase, vaccine deliveries had jumped 57 percent since President Biden was inaugurated. Administration officials have regularly framed those increases as Mr. Biden’s accomplishment, even though, at least to some degree, the supplies were expected to grow as Pfizer and Moderna ramped up manufacturing.
The announcement on Tuesday came as winter storms in the South continued to disrupt vaccine distribution. Clinics were closed and shipments were stalled in states where the pace of vaccinations had already lagged behind the national average. Vaccine appointments were rescheduled or canceled from Texas to Kentucky.
A spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesday that the government was projecting “widespread delays” in vaccine shipments and deliveries in the coming days, because weather was affecting a FedEx facility in Memphis and a UPS facility in Louisville, both vaccine shipping hubs.
“C.D.C. and federal partners are working closely with the jurisdictions, as well as manufacturing and shipping partners, to assess weather conditions and help mitigate potential delivery delays and cancellations,” the spokeswoman said.
Ms. Psaki said that officials were monitoring the storms and in touch with state and local governments. She said there was a “contingency plan to ensure people are getting the doses they need at an appropriate timeline.”
The increase in doses for pharmacies announced on Tuesday came after White House officials had warned that supplies to that program would initially be extremely limited. More than 40,000 pharmacies are expected to receive doses as part of the program.
On Tuesday, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and adviser to Mr. Biden, revised his own estimate from last week, when he predicted the beginning of an “open season” by April. “That timeline will probably be prolonged, maybe into mid-to-late May and early June,” he said in an interview with CNN.
Campbell Robertson contributed reporting.
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