President-elect Joe Biden plans to attack the Trump administration on Tuesday for “failing” the pace of Americans’ vaccination against Covid, said a transition official, anticipating the comments.
“As (Biden) has been doing since the beginning of this crisis, he will be honest and direct with the American people about what is to come and will deal with the current government that is falling short of its vaccination rate,” said the official.
The Trump administration’s vaccine distribution efforts are starting more slowly than officials had projected, after a series of unexpected obstacles, highlighting the logistical complexity of the Herculean effort.
Officials working on Trump’s Operation Warp Speed said this month that they plan to have 20 million doses of the vaccine distributed by the end of the year, compared with 100 million doses that Trump had designed in September would be shipped by the end of the year.
But while the federal government said on Monday that 11.5 million cows have been sent to states so far, only about 2 million people have received their first dose, according to data compiled by NBC News from federal and state agencies.
At the current rate of about one million injections per week, the U.S. will fall far short of projections by Trump administration officials that anyone who wants an injection will be able to get one in the spring, the Drs said. Celine Gounder, a member of Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, and Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University School of Public Health. This will require millions of injections to be administered every day for months in order for the country to return to some sense of normalcy in the spring, they said.
Biden promised to administer 100 million injections in his first 100 days in office.
Also on Tuesday, vice president-elect Kamala Harris will receive the vaccine, just over a week after Biden received her first dose of the vaccine live on television.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist, recommended that Biden and Harris be vaccinated as soon as possible for national security reasons.
Biden’s comments on Covid’s ongoing crisis and vaccination program will follow in the wake of President Donald Trump’s decision on Sunday night to sign the $ 2.3 trillion government funding and coronavirus relief package , narrowly avoiding government closure.
Biden criticized Trump over the weekend for hesitating to sign the bill, calling it “abdication of responsibility”.
Biden’s comments on Covid on Tuesday also come as the Capitol struggles to decide whether to raise coronavirus stimulus checks to $ 2,000, as Trump has argued.
The Democratic-controlled House passed a bill on Monday night to increase direct payments for coronavirus aid, although the move faces an uphill battle in the Republican Senate.
Biden said on Monday he supported increasing direct payments to $ 2,000.
Meanwhile, the Joint Parliamentary Commission on Induction Ceremonies also announced on Tuesday that it canceled the traditional Induction Day lunch on January 20 with the newly appointed president and vice president, citing health concerns.
“In light of the ongoing pandemic, the JCCIC, in consultation with the Presidential Inauguration Committee, made the decision not to promote the traditional inaugural lunch,” said Paige Waltz, a JCCIC spokesman, adding that more announcements would be made at several inaugural ceremonies that normally take place at the United States Capitol.
