Biden’s team finds hard promises to make

“It was based on the fact that J&J – the Johnson product – had considerably more doses than now, we know they’re going to have some,” Fauci said this week explaining his original April target, adding that he believed now that restrictions on who are eligible for the vaccine will fall in “mid-May and early June”.

A person familiar with the process, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the internal discussions, told CNN that the more upbeat public comments reflected private and upbeat conversations between the administration and Johnson & Johnson. Because the company had more hope in recent weeks about what to expect in April, officials have also been – and their public statements have reflected that.

But expectations of a massive dose increase were dashed when Johnson & Johnson tempered their projections. The company is still grappling with increased production at its Baltimore facility, and the government now estimates that less than 7 million doses of its vaccine will initially be available if it is cleared, as planned, in the coming weeks. .

Johnson & Johnson has a contractual obligation to provide the federal government with 100 million doses by the end of June.

“We are doing everything we can, working with the company, to speed up their delivery schedule,” said Jeff Zients, Biden’s coronavirus coordinator.

Instructive course

The episode with Johnson & Johnson proved instructive for some in the White House, who remain keen to provide the public with good news about vaccine supplies and a trend toward normality, but have been wary of making promises that ‘they can’t hold on.

Biden will visit a Pfizer plant in Michigan on Friday, hoping to highlight the administration’s efforts to get doses quickly into the arms of Americans. The United States has purchased 300 million doses of the vaccine from that company and plans to deliver them sooner than expected. But even with big commitments and rushed deadlines, Biden is still careful to name a firm date that every American who wants a photo can get one.

The concrete goals Biden set, including vaccinating one million Americans a day, were extremely cautious, as the United States had almost met that goal when Biden took office.

And others – like his vow to have enough vaccines available to nearly all Americans by the end of July – have serious caveats. He said that even on that date, many Americans will still have to wait due to a lack of personnel and accessories to administer the vaccines.

At least on schools, Biden blamed the communication errors for the muddled schedule, though even now it’s unclear when the administration thinks all students – including those in high school – might be able to return to school. classroom.

But elsewhere, Biden and his team are finding that even following the science and listening to the experts – the two things they put at the heart of his campaign speech – don’t provide clear or straightforward answers to the questions Americans are desperately seeking. almost a year after the start of the pandemic.

Realistic goals

Biden collaborators say he is realistic in the midst of an unpredictable and unprecedented health crisis, and does not want to raise the hopes of Americans when they could easily be dashed again by the manufacture of snafus, the re-emergence of variants or other invisible hiccups to bring the country back to normal.

He also took to heart the experience of the previous administration, which offered various timelines for reopening and “flattening the curve” that came and went, often without a scientific basis.

At the start of the crisis, Trump offered the rose-dubbed “15 days to slow the spread,” hoping the outbreak would last only a few weeks. When it became clear that this was not happening, Trump extended the guidelines to 30 days, but still offered deadlines with little to substantiate them.

He told Americans he wanted the country to “open up and look forward to going to Easter” – a timeline that administration health experts have privately questioned. When that date came and went, officials – including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner – placed their hopes on the summer.

“I think you’ll see by June that much of the country should be back to normal, and the hope is that by July the country will really get back on its feet,” Kushner said last spring.

This also turned out to be wrong as cases started to rise and states maintained their lockdowns.

In October, when his re-election campaign was in full swing, Trump said the country was “turning the curve” even as cases began to skyrocket. Biden used the independent predictions of science to claim that his rival was not straightforward with the American people.

“Be careful not to predict things that you don’t know for sure what will happen because then you will be held accountable,” Biden said at CNN mayoralty on Tuesday, describing the advice he said he had. received from health experts. like Fauci.

He made the observation while responding to a question about when the country would return to normal, which he was targeting for Christmas – in almost a year. That’s more than a fall target once proposed by Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, though even Fauci admitted on Wednesday that predicting “normalcy” was a matter of guesswork.

“It’s perfectly reasonable to say that. We don’t know,” he said of Biden’s Christmas screening in an interview on CNN. “The president made an estimate, which I think is a very reasonable estimate.”

A day after Biden’s mayor, however, the White House said that even Biden’s Christmas prediction shouldn’t be seen as an outright commitment.

“We are not in a place where we can predict exactly when everyone will feel normal again,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki said.

Largest projections

In some cases, the caution of Biden and his team in offering something other than the broadest projections of how and when his efforts to contain the pandemic will materialize has caused confusion.

The White House’s position on reopening schools became confused when Psaki, explaining Biden’s commitment, said that could only mean 50% of schools open one day a week.

She later said that was “not the ceiling” of the administration’s aspirations, and Biden said on Tuesday that the White House’s confused position boiled down to “miscommunication.”

But the White House has always found itself caught between a desire to reopen to allow parents to return to work and teachers’ unions that advocate cautious members to return to class without strict protections against the virus.

Even Biden’s attempts at clarification did not offer a date when he believed every American student could resume learning in person. He said his goal was to have K-8 classes in classrooms five days a week in his first 100 days as president, but couldn’t offer a similar goal to high school students.

And in subsequent interviews, the administration was unable to say explicitly whether vaccinating teachers should be a prerequisite for reopening schools, which the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in its guidelines. was not.

“These are really difficult things to which there are no clear answers,” said Jim Messina, who was President Barack Obama’s deputy chief of staff before leading his re-election campaign. “And you’ve seen a president who is going to continue to be very honest with the country even if some people don’t want to hear him.”