White House can’t say where COVID-19 vaccine supply is

White House press secretary Jen Psaki again ran out of answers on Tuesday on how many doses of the coveted coronavirus vaccine the United States has in store, a day after admitting that the Biden administration did not know how many doses were available.

During his daily briefing, Psaki repeatedly danced around requests for precise numbers on the jabs available, at any given time, attending a President Biden briefing scheduled for later today.

“The president is going to have more than one update later this afternoon,” she said, when asked at close range how many doses are currently in the US stockpile.

“We are monitoring daily updates … on the vaccine numbers that are being distributed to states, what states have received, what they have distributed, and we’ve connected all the dots to make sure we have our better understanding of where the delays are, ”she added, without specifying what those numbers really are.

Pressed for an explanation of the heist, Psaki, as she did on Monday, backed down on the excuse that the Biden administration still has less than a week.

“Well, six days later, the president also provides an update on what steps we will take to provide more vaccines to states across the country in response to their concern that no federal plan has been put in place and that ‘They did not receive the coordination, cooperation and information they wanted,’ Psaki said. “In my opinion, this is a fairly quick response to state concerns.”

And pressed later in the briefing how the White House can repeatedly tout its intention to vaccinate 100 million people during the first 100 days of the Biden administration, and to have vaccines widely available in the spring without this data, Psaki insisted that the administration “made sense”. on the numbers – but again keep them to herself if she had them.

“As I started the briefing, the president will have more to say about our vaccine supply and also about the assistance and cooperation we will be doing with states later this afternoon,” she said. . “And, as I also noted, we have meaning.”

Psaki cited Tiberius, the software platform used by the federal government to track vaccine deployment.

“We assess every day where the holes are, where the gaps are, what the delays are,” she said.

State and local leaders, including New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, have pleaded with the federal government to step up vaccine distribution to meet both demand and their ability to deliver the vaccine.

As the federal government searched for answers, New York was forced to postpone people’s immunization appointments and shut down some large-scale administrative sites due to a lack of available vaccines.