President-elect Joe Biden criticized the outgoing administration’s coronavirus vaccine roll-out plan, citing that their plan is lagging “behind.” While addressing a news conference from his hometown in Delaware, Biden said, “The effort to distribute and administer the vaccine is not progressing as it should.” According to the data provided by the Centers for Disease Control, as many as 2.1 million doses of vaccines have been given to the American people so far.
The Democratic leader argued that the Trump administration’s plan is moving too slow, and if it moves at this pace, “it could take years, not months to vaccine the Americans. Joe Biden took the opportunity and touted his administration’s ambitious goal of administering more than 100 million vaccines in his first hundred days in the White House.
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He further vowed to ramp up the current distribution plan and speed it up to nearly one million doses per day. However, Biden acknowledged that it could take months to have the majority of the population vaccinated. The President-elect told the American people that he has already asked his team to prepare an aggressive vaccination drive and get things “back on track.”
Meanwhile, Admiral Brett Giroir, the US assistant health secretary, said that his agency would need ten more days to hit their 20 million thresholds. While talking to a local news channel, he said that by the end of next week, “we’ll be at 19.9 million” vaccinations. He further added that the drive will ramp up now, arguing that it has been only fifteen days since the first shot was administered.
On the other hand, Kamala Harris, Biden’s mate, received her shot on live television in a bid to boost the national confidence in the vaccination drive. Biden vowed to make the fight against the pandemic outbreak in the US, which has so far killed more than 334,000 people with more than 19 million people infected with the respiratory disease. Last week, he received his first dose of the vaccine on live television; a total of two doses are required for full protection from coronavirus.
Trump, who had downplayed the pandemic since it began, was infected with the virus himself in October but is yet to receive a shot publicly. His administration’s response to the pandemic has been seen by many as a disorganized response. Health experts have stated that Biden’s administrations will face the logistical hurdle in the distribution of the shots.
Meanwhile, his pick for the US surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, told a local news channel that they plan to get the more vulnerable population vaccinated first, adding that the more realistic approach would be mid-2021 when the vaccine reaches the general population. So far, the US has approved two vaccines, one developed by Pfizer and the other one by Moderna.
