The Biden government announced on Tuesday that it is further increasing the weekly vaccine shipments that the federal government sends to states.
The White House COVID-19 response team announced that states will now receive 14.5 million doses starting next week, a jump of 13.5 million.
The team tweeted that the number is “an increase of almost 70% since we took office just over a month ago”.
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White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki
Jen PsakiTanden’s path to confirmation seems increasingly unsustainable Asia-Pacific-American group asks senators to confirm Tanden Biden to order flags to half the team to score 500,000 virus deaths MORE said on Tuesday that the White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients
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This afternoon, we announced that we are increasing the weekly supply of vaccines to the states to 14.5 million doses starting next week, up from the 13.5 million announced last week.
That’s an almost 70% increase since we took office just over a month ago.
– White House COVID-19 Response Team (@WHCOVIDResponse) February 23, 2021
The announcement comes a week after the White House announced it was increasing the number of doses distributed from 11 million to 13.5 million.
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The Biden administration is working to strengthen its vaccination efforts in the face of a number of variants that appear to be more infectious than the original coronavirus strain that has spread around the world. COVID-19 cases are dropping across the country, but the presence of variants threatens to make this drop only temporary.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 65 million people have been inoculated with at least one injection of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine, the only two approved so far by the Food and Drug Administration. Of these people, nearly 20 million received both doses, or about 6% of the US population.
The expansion of the distribution of vaccines by the federal government comes at a time when Moderna and Pfizer say on Tuesday that they will be able to deliver more than 130 million additional combined doses by the end of March. The two companies already have contracts to supply 600 million doses.