Speaking to the National Institutes of Health, President Joe Biden said his administration had secured enough Covid-19 vaccines to ensure the nation is on track to vaccinate 300 million Americans by mid-July. Evan Vucci / AP hide caption
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Evan Vucci / AP
Speaking to the National Institutes of Health, President Joe Biden said his administration had secured enough Covid-19 vaccines to ensure the nation is on track to vaccinate 300 million Americans by mid-July.
Evan Vucci / AP
President Biden has signed deals to purchase an additional 200 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer and Moderna by the end of July, increasing the likelihood of fulfilling his promise to vaccinate all Americans by midsummer.
Biden announced The latest deals that are part of a plan he unveiled two weeks ago during the remarks made at the National Institutes of Health on Thursday.
“We’ve now bought enough vaccines to vaccinate all Americans,” said Biden. “Now we’re working to get these vaccines into the arms of millions of people.”
According to Biden, Pfizer and Moderna have also agreed to accelerate the dispensing of 100 million doses by a month and move them to May instead of June.
“That’s a month faster,” said Biden. “That means lives will be saved.”
The new orders for the vaccines come in addition to the doses that the two companies are due to deliver as early as March.
“That means we are now on track to serve 300 million Americans.”
The aggressive urge to increase the supply of hard-to-get life-saving injections is part of the “round-the-clock” work of the new government and the country’s leading health agencies, he said.
“In just three weeks, we deployed over 1,000 federal workers to vaccination sites across the country,” added Biden.
Among the many setbacks his administration has faced in taking office and taking on the pandemic, the president found he was misled about the actual supply of vaccines to the Trump administration.
“My predecessor didn’t do his job to be frank,” said Biden. “We’re not going to get everything fixed for a while. But we will fix it.”
Biden added, “I was upset that I didn’t have all of the facts that were available for the final outfit. We got the distinct impression that there were significantly more vaccines available to start distribution.”
Even more relief could come from Johnson & Johnson, which has developed a vaccine that can inoculate recipients with a single dose. This company stands ready to add 100 million more doses after approval by the Food and Drug Administration.
