The US has finalized an order for 200m more vaccine doses – 100m doses each from Pfizer and Moderna – to be delivered by the end of July, Joe Biden confirmed on Monday.
Speaking at the National Institutes of Health on Thursday, the president touted his team’s early efforts to expand access to coronavirus vaccines, and criticized Donald Trump’s strategy for distributing vaccines, saying the last administration did not order enough doses or mobilize enough people to administer shots.
“While scientists did their job in discovering vaccines in record time, my predecessor – I’ll be very blunt about it – did not do his job in getting ready for the massive challenge of vaccinating hundreds of millions,” Biden said.
With demand for the vaccine far outstripping supply, Americans are struggling to get appointments for their inoculations, leaving Biden with an acute problem less than a month after taking over from Trump.
Biden said that Trump, who spent his last two months in office in a futile effort to overturn the results of the November presidential election that he lost, left the vaccine program in “much worse shape” than Biden had anticipated and that his team had been misled about the vaccine supply.
Biden also celebrated that the US is on track to exceed his goal of 100m vaccine doses distributed over his first 100 days in office, but he emphasized Americans still had to take precautions to limit the spread of the virus.
“Mask up, America. Mask up,” Biden said.
Biden said the US coronavirus death toll is likely to reach 500,000 next month.
“We’ve now purchased enough vaccine to vaccinate all Americans,” Biden said. He said the United States, which has a population of about 330 million, was on track to have 300 million doses by the end of July.
