President Joe Biden said on Monday that he believes it will be “this spring” when any American who wants a COVID-19 vaccine will be able to get it. This is perhaps the most ambitious target publicly mentioned by your government to date.
“I think it will be this spring. I think we can do it this spring,” said Biden on Monday, when a reporter asked him when any American who wanted a vaccine should be able to get it. “But it will be a logistical challenge that goes beyond everything we have tried in this country. But I think we can do that. I am confident that in the summer we will be well on the way to collective immunity and increase access for people who are not in the first place, on the list. , going to the kids and how we deal with it. But I feel good about where we’re going and I think we can do that. ”
In recent days, Biden government officials on phone calls and press conferences have refused to set a specific timetable for when the vaccine will be widely available to the public.
The new president also raised his hopes of how many doses of the vaccine can be administered during his first 100 days in office, revising from 100 million to 150 million. Some questioned whether the Biden government’s 100 million injections in the first 100 days were ambitious enough, considering that the United States already administered about 1 million injections per day when he took office.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, now Biden’s advisor in the COVID-19 response, said in a interview on “Face the Nation” Sunday the government hopes to overcome this goal.
“It will be a challenge,” said Fauci. “I think it was a reasonable goal that was set, we always want to do better than the goal you set, but it is really a floor and not a ceiling.”
In December, Fauci estimated that it could be “sometime in late March, early April, that the normal, healthy man and woman who lived on the street, with no underlying conditions, would probably catch him.” Fauci said he hopes that by the beginning of the summer, enough people will be vaccinated in the US for the country to start reaching herd immunity. There is no definite determination of herd immunity for COVID-19, but experts estimate that at least 70% of the population needs to have immunity against the virus to achieve it.
On a Poll CBS News earlier this month, 59% of Americans surveyed said they thought the vaccine’s launch was going too slow, while a smaller number remained hesitant to get it. Forty-one percent said they would have the injection as soon as they could, while 37% said they would wait to see how the others would go first.