WASHINGTON (AP) – Meetings begin every day, not long after dawn. Dozens of aides came in, coffee in hand, joined by Zoom from the agency’s headquarters, from their homes or even from adjacent offices.
The sessions start with the latest worrying statistics designed to focus work and offer a reminder of what’s at stake: new cases of coronavirus, people in hospitals, deaths. But they also include the latest signs of progress: administered COVID-19 tests, doses of vaccine sent, injected shots.
Where the last administration addressed the pandemic with the vernacular of a natural disaster – using the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s mantra of a response “supported by the federal government, administered by the state and executed locally” – President Joe Biden’s team is borrowing from the Pentagon and the doctrine of overwhelming force .
“We are at war with this virus,” said COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients in an interview with The Associated Press between Sunday morning meetings about the response. “We are using all the resources and tools that the federal government has to fight on all fronts.”
It is a strategy that faces urgent testing after Biden inherited an inconsistent vaccine distribution plan and the threats emerging from new virus variants.
The objective, say Biden’s aides, is as simple as it is ambitious: after a year in defense, they want to fight the virus – “overcome the problem”, a kind of mantra for the team.
The campaign is being waged in sterile pharmaceutical schools and factories, on the large asphalt of stadium parking lots and along sidewalks outside American homes. To defeat the virus, Biden’s team must oversee a Herculean logistical effort to inject hundreds of millions of weapons, but also overcome the vaccine’s hesitation, politically charged scientific skepticism and fatigue in all corners of society after almost a year of difficulties.
For Biden, fighting the pandemic is a definite challenge for his presidency, testing his central promise to the American people that he can better manage the outbreak than his predecessor. His team, apparently day by day, develops an almost stunning series of new efforts and resources, large and small – everything from building a surgical glove factory in the United States to the end of the year to asking Americans to wear masks while walking with your dogs.
The central question for Biden and his team, which still cannot be answered: Will everything add up enough?
“They are taking exactly the right approach,” said Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and professor of public health at George Washington University, who previously served as Baltimore’s health commissioner. “The federal government is taking responsibility, instead of leaving everything to state and local governments and blaming others when things go wrong.”
Despite all the activity, however, Biden knows that there are darker statistics to come before Americans can return to any resemblance to the “previous days”.
More Americans died of COVID-19 last year, who died during the fighting in World War II, and some projections show that the death toll could surpass that of the Civil War in early summer.
New cases of viruses, which reached historic levels after the holiday season, steadily declined in Biden’s first few weeks in office, but are still worryingly high, and lives are still being lost at a rate of about 21,000 a week.
Since he took office three weeks ago, Biden’s team has tackled the problem on several fronts. They released billions of federal dollars to increase vaccinations and tests and developed a model to send more than 10,000 active duty soldiers to join even more National Guard members to shoot guns. Mass vaccination sites, supported by federal troops, are due to open in California, Texas and New York in the coming weeks.
As concerns over potentially dangerous mutations in the virus grow, Biden’s aides see vaccines less as a silver bullet and more as part of a complementary series of moves that together offer the prospect of real progress.
And for the United States to fully contain the problem, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist, warned that the pace of vaccinations must increase globally to reduce mutants.
“We are not going to embellish in any way how difficult it is, but we will demonstrate clear evidence of progress and action,” said Zients.
Biden is already on track to exceed his goal of 100 million vaccinations in his first 100 days in office. It is a surely achievable goal that some consider inadequate, but it is also a break with the Trump administration’s erroneous predictions that undermine public confidence. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least 26 million doses were administered in Biden’s first three weeks in office.
Much of the improvement in vaccination deliveries so far is due to long-planned manufacturing ramp-ups, and not the actions of Biden’s team, the advisers acknowledge. But with the prospect of a third vaccine being approved in the coming weeks, they are trying to anticipate and eliminate the next set of bottlenecks, when the ability to deliver injections and the demand for vaccines become limiting factors.
Wen urged the Biden government to set more aggressive targets – a shot to the moon – to increase the rate of vaccinations to 3 million a day. “I think they just need to be a lot more ambitious when talking to the audience,” she said.
In addition to the focus on the absolute number of shots fired, there is the question of which arms.
Biden’s team has played an increasingly important role in determining the destination of each vaccine vial, with the aim of ensuring that low-income, rural and minority communities are covered, an implicit criticism of how some states have dealt with their implementations.
New distributions to community health centers, announced on Tuesday, and a 1 million weekly dose pharmacy program being launched this week will allow the White House to forward vaccines directly to underserved communities.
Ideas have their critics. In a call with the White House on Tuesday, Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson called on the government to work through the states instead of alternative distribution routes, arguing that they have excessive demand that they can no longer meet. Other governors expressed concern that the federal program would thwart their own plans to use these health centers to distribute vaccines.
“While governors appreciate the federal partnership, it is important that any increase in vaccine manufacturing capacity goes to states for distribution and is not duplicated in separate federal programs,” Hutchinson told AP.
The White House defended them as pilot programs that can be expanded to more locations with more doses, if they prove effective.
In one important case, the more active federal response meant that the Biden White House took a step back.
Where the Trump White House got involved in editing the CDC guidelines for business, travel and schools – generating complaints about meddling in science and leading some states to adopt their own stricter protocols – the Biden government is leaving it to career scientists to elaborate of policies.
New more prescriptive federal guidelines on schools are expected as early as Friday. Although Biden promised in December that “most of our schools can be opened by the end of my first 100 days”, his administration has since narrowed that goal to cover only K-8 schools and yet plans to successfully count on only open one day a week.
This is drawing criticism from some Republicans who say Biden is setting the bar too low and ignoring school classes that remained open during most of the pandemic.
One of the early successes of the Biden plan was born out of conversations with governors frustrated by the constant fluctuation in the supply of vaccines. The lack of certainty led some states to slow down the administration of the first doses to ensure that sufficient second shots were available if births slowed. Biden’s team pledged to warn states three weeks in advance of what is to come.
“Now we see more vaccines on the horizon than a few weeks ago,” Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, told the AP. “The more we learn about more vaccines, the happier I am.”
The first public assessments of Biden’s response were largely positive.
Two weeks after Biden’s administration, a Quinnipiac poll showed 61% of Americans approving the way the president is dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. Almost all Democrats and 33% of Republicans said they did. In a Quinnipiac poll in December, 39% of Americans approved of the way President Donald Trump was dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. Seventy-eight percent of Republicans, but only 3% of Democrats, approved.
Biden’s national pandemic strategy, released on his second day in office, provides the roadmap for the coming months: more tests, clear guidelines and fairer vaccinations.
But the path to a “new normal” is not yet clear. The science of what it will take to achieve “herd immunity”, particularly with the emergence of new mutations, remains unresolved.
The Biden team is already actively working with pharmaceutical companies to prepare “booster” vaccines for variants, potentially annually, such as flu vaccines. And they are building the infrastructure to speed up testing of the virus, as testing can be part of life for many years.
Biden’s call for Americans to wear a mask during their first 100 days will undoubtedly be extended, aides said. And your other goals are likely to adjust upwards in the coming months.
“We will define the next set of goals as we move towards the first set of goals,” said Zients.
___
Associated Press writers Hannah Fingerhut and Jonathan Lemire in Washington and Andrew DeMillo in Little Rock, Arkansas contributed to this report.