President Biden unveils national pandemic response plan.
Plan includes new rules for masks and testing board
President Joe Biden, pledging a “full-scale wartime effort” to combat the coronavirus pandemic, signed a string of executive orders and presidential directives on Thursday aimed at creating the kind of centralized authority that the Trump administration had shied away from.
The orders included new requirements for masks on interstate planes, trains and buses, the creation of a national testing board and mandatory quarantines for international travelers arriving in the United States. Biden predicted that the U.S. death toll from COVID -19 would top 500,000 next month.
“History is going to measure whether we are up to the task,” Biden declared in an appearance in the White House’s State Dining Room, with Vice President Kamala Harris and Dr. Anthony Fauci, his chief COVID -19 medical adviser, by his side.
The pandemic poses the most pressing challenge of Biden’s early days in office. How he handles it will set the tone for how Americans view his administration going forward, as Biden himself acknowledged.
In a 200-page document released earlier Thursday called “National Strategy for the COVID -19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness,” the new administration outlines the kind of centralized federal response that Democrats have long demanded and President Donald Trump refused.
The new president took a shot at Trump, saying, “For the past year we couldn’t rely on the federal government to act with the urgency and focus and coordination that we needed, and we have seen the tragic cost of that failure.”
But the Biden plan is in some respects overly optimistic and, in others, not ambitious enough, some experts say. It is not clear how he will enforce the new quarantine requirement. And his promise to inject 100 million vaccines in his first hundred days is aiming low, experts say, since those 100 days should see twice that number of doses available.
Biden bristled when a reporter asked if the goal should be for a higher. “When I announced, you all said it’s not possible,” Biden shot back. “Come on, give me a break, man.”
Because the currently approved coronavirus vaccines require two doses, but some Americans have already had their first shots, Biden’s promise should cover 65 million to 70 million Americans, said Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under Trump.
“I think we can reach that goal and probably reach higher, by focusing on how many people are being vaccinated for the first time each day,” Gottlieb said. With vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna already granted emergency approval and a third, by Johnson & Johnson, likely to be authorized next month, he said, “we can definitely reach many more patients.”
Beyond the 100-day mark is where the problem lies. Federal health officials and corporate executives agree that it will be impossible to increase the immediate supply of vaccines before April at the earliest because of lack of manufacturing capacity.
“The brutal truth is it’s going to take months before we can get the majority of Americans vaccinated,” Biden said.
The Biden team said it had identified 12 “immediate supply shortfalls” that were critical to the pandemic response, including N95 surgical masks and isolation gowns, as well as swabs, reagents and pipettes used in testing — deficiencies that have dogged the nation for nearly a year. Jen Psaki, the new White House press secretary, told reporters Wednesday evening that Biden “absolutely remains committed” to invoking the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era law, to bolster supplies.
Biden’s strategy is organized around seven goals, including restoring trust with the American people by conducting “regular expert-led, science-based briefings” and advancing equity “across racial, ethnic and rural/urban lines” — another departure from Trump’s approach.