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WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden has said he expects anyone who wants a vaccine to be able to get one by the spring and has raised his vaccination target for his first 100 days in office.
Biden said on Monday he now believes the country can deliver 1.5 million vaccines per day in the coming weeks and deliver 150 million vaccines over the next 100 days, “with the grace of God.”
In December, Biden set a goal of 100 million vaccines in his first 100 days and, at the time, no vaccines had been licensed. But with states stepping up their vaccination efforts in recent weeks, the country is already on average meeting Biden’s target of around 1 million shots per day.
In order to achieve his new goal, Biden said the federal government is going to need to set up more vaccination sites, hire more people to administer the vaccines and ensure there are enough products such as syringes. . He’s asking Congress for more than $ 400 billion to fund these efforts.
“It’s going to be a logistical challenge that is beyond anything we’ve ever tried in this country, but I think we can do it,” Biden said. He said that by the summer “we will be on track to move towards collective immunity,” including making the vaccine available to children.
Biden has warned that the United States will still take time to defeat the virus – responding to criticism of his recent remarks that the trajectory of the virus will not be altered for months.
“It’s going to take time, it’s going to take a tremendous amount of time,” Biden said, adding that “we’ve been in this situation for a while.”
Because the two approved vaccines require two doses to achieve full benefits, 150 million vaccines would provide protection to 75 million Americans, or about 23% of the population. Public health officials, including those working with the Biden administration, have said it would take more than 70% of the population to get vaccinated to achieve herd immunity.
State officials have increasingly complained about the lack of supplies of vaccines and items such as syringes. Officials have also complained about the lack of consistent information from the federal government on how many doses they will receive and when they will be received. Biden said he was working with vaccine makers, Pfizer and Moderna, to produce more vaccines in a “relatively short period of time.”
Biden’s accelerated schedule is even less optimistic than that presented by the previous president. The Trump administration’s Health and Human Services section. Alex Azar said in December that the general public could get vaccinated at their local pharmacy as early as the end of February. Azar also pledged that 20 million people would receive the vaccine by the end of the year – a milestone the country did not reach until Sunday.
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