Biden criticizes Trump on vaccine distribution and pledges to pick up pace
President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday criticized the speed of vaccine distribution and promised to step up the pace when he takes office, while delivering a sober warning about the toll of the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden offered a bleak assessment of the months ahead, saying they would be “a very tough period for our nation,” and he exhorted Americans to make the sacrifices necessary to overcome the devastation of the virus.
“It’s going to take all the grit and determination we have as Americans to get it done,” he said.
He warned that if the current pace of administering vaccines under President Donald Trump continued, “it’s going to take years, not months” to vaccinate the nation. And he said he had directed his team to prepare a more aggressive effort once he takes office on Jan. 20, pledging “to move heaven and earth to get us going in the right direction.”
“This is going to be the greatest operational challenge we’ve ever faced as a nation,” Biden said during an address in Wilmington, Delaware, “but we’re going to get it done.”
Biden will take office amid a health crisis that has already killed more than 336,000 people in the United States and inflicted widespread economic disruption. Distributing vaccines to the American people will pose an early test for him.
This month, federal officials had said their goal was for 20 million people to get their first shots of a vaccine by the end of the year. As of Monday morning, 11.4 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines had been sent across the country, but just 2.1 million people in the United States had received their first dose, according to a dashboard that is maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and most likely reflects a reporting lag of several days.
Biden has vowed to get 100 million vaccine shots into the arms of Americans in his first 100 days in office; vaccination currently requires two shots, which would suggest that about 50 million people would be vaccinated in that time.
Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s effort to fast-track the development and rollout of vaccines, spent billions of dollars to help drug companies test and manufacture their vaccines and ensure that they would have a buyer. Those investments helped vaccines become available much faster than many experts had predicted.
Still, getting those vaccines into arms has gotten off to a slower start than federal officials had hoped.
“We certainly are not at the numbers that we wanted to be at the end of December,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, said on CNN on Tuesday. But he added, “I believe that as we get into January, we are going to see an increase in the momentum.”
Moncef Slaoui, the scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed, said as recently as last week that the odds were high that the first 100 million people in the United States would be immunized by the end of March.
And in a tweet on Tuesday, Trump said it was “up to the States to distribute the vaccines once brought to the designated areas by the Federal Government.”
The pace of inoculation in the United States was expected to pick up in the first months of next year as more vaccine supply became available and more facilities begin giving it to a wider swath of Americans. So far, vaccines have been given primarily to healthcare workers at hospitals and to residents of nursing homes and other longterm care facilities.
In his remarks Tuesday, Biden said he could “see a return to normalcy in the next year,” but he also offered a bracing forecast for the near future. “We need to steel our spines for what’s ahead,” he said, adding that the next few months could be “the toughest during this entire pandemic.”
“I know it’s hard to hear, but it’s the truth,” he said.
He expressed hope that Trump, who has resisted wearing a mask and mocked Biden during the campaign for wearing one, could still influence the public in a positive way.
“It would make a huge difference for President Trump to say, ‘Wear masks,’” Biden said. “I hope the president will clearly and unambiguously urge all Americans to take the vaccine once it’s available.”
State and local officials have said they need more money to distribute and administer vaccines. The $900 billion relief bill that Trump signed into law on Sunday sets aside more than $8 billion for vaccine distribution, roughly in line with the $8.4 billion that health departments requested.