Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Biden orders ‘full-scale’ tilt to fight virus
Edicts include testing panel, traveler masks, quarantines
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden, pledging a “full-scale wartime effort” to combat the coronavirus pandemic, signed a string of executive orders and presidential directives 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 said 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.
With thousands of Americans dying every day from covid-19, a national death toll that exceeds 400,000 and a new, more infectious variant of the virus spreading quickly, the pandemic poses the most pressing challenge of Biden’s early days in office.
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
had refused.
The new president said that “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 100 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 higher. “When I announced, you all said it’s not possible,” Biden said. “Come on, give me a break, man.”
Because the currently approved coronavirus vaccines require two doses and 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, 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.
On Capitol Hill, the No. 2 House Republican, Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, said Biden’s promise to get “100 million shots into the arms of the American people” within his first 100 days in office is insufficient.
“Comments made about vaccine supply and distribution by the White House’s coronavirus czar are old Washington spin,” Scalise said in a statement. “The fact is the Biden administration inherited contracts for 300 million doses of vaccines for two approved vaccines and two in the final stage of clinical trials.”
“If President Biden wants to develop a new plan to administer 200 million vaccines in 100 days,” he added, “congressional Republicans stand ready to work with President Biden to help further speed vaccine distribution.”
ASSERTIVE APPROACH
The release of the national strategy, coming one day after Biden was inaugurated, is an effort to signal to the public that his approach will be more assertive on a range of fronts — from ordering federal agencies to invoke the Defense Production Act to boost the manufacture of necessary supplies, to requiring mask-wearing “in airports, on certain modes of public transportation, including many trains, airplanes, maritime vessels, and intercity buses,” according to a fact sheet issued by the Biden administration.
Although airlines, Amtrak and other transport providers now require masks, Biden’s order makes it a federal mandate, leaving little wiggle room for passengers tempted to argue about their rights. The action was applauded by airline unions and supported by a major industry trade group.
Airline workers have described the dangerous results of passengers refusing to follow mask requirements ordered by airlines. Safety reports filed with the federal government show flight attendants being repeatedly taunted and verbally abused by passengers, including some who called the virus a “political hoax.”
The strategy also seeks more aggressive action by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, including considering emergency standards on mask-wearing and other matters. “Biden is taking steps to cover workers not typically covered by OSHA … by directing agencies like the Department of Transportation to keep workers safe,” according to the strategy document.
The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention previously outlined the reasoning behind its “strong recommendation” to wear masks during travel.
“Traveling on public conveyances increases a person’s risk of getting and spreading covid-19 by bringing people in close contact with others, often for prolonged periods,” the CDC said.
“People should wear masks when traveling into, within, or out of the United States on conveyances,” the agency said in the earlier guidance. “Local transmission can grow quickly into interstate and international transmission when infected people travel on public conveyances without wearing a mask and with others who are not wearing masks.”
The Biden team said it had also 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.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., praised Biden’s plan to invoke the act as a way to reverse “the hollowing out of America’s manufacturing-destroyed jobs, families and communities across this country.”
On Thursday, a group influential with Republican officeholders lent its support to the president’s strategy. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said, “we support the new administration’s focus on removing roadblocks to vaccinations and reopening schools, both of which are important steps to accelerating a broad-based economic recovery for all Americans.”
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.
Biden has directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to begin setting up vaccination centers, aiming to have 100 up and running in a month. He’s ordering the CDC to begin a program to make vaccines available through local pharmacies starting next month, building on a plan devised by the Trump administration. And he’s launching an effort to train more people to administer shots.
Biden has set a goal of having most kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools reopen in his first 100 days, and he’s ordering the departments of Education and Health and Human Services to provide clear guidance for reopening them safely. States would also be able to tap FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund to help get schools back open.
But administration officials stressed that reopening schools safely depends on increased testing.
The administration is asking Congress for $1.9 trillion for pandemic relief, and White House officials said they will need much of that money to put their covid-19 plan into place.
“On the asymptomatic screening side, we’re woefully undercapacity, so we need the money in order to really ramp up testing, which is so important to reopening schools and businesses,” said Jeff Zients, the new White House covid-19 response coordinator. “We need the testing. We need the money from Congress to fund the national strategy that the president will lay out.”
VACCINE SHORTAGES
Public health experts Thursday blamed covid-19 vaccine shortages around the U.S. in part on the Trump administration’s push to get states to vastly expand their vaccination drives to reach the nation’s estimated 54 million people age 65 and
over.
The push that began over a week ago has not been accompanied by enough doses to meet demand, according to state and local officials, leading to frustration and confusion, and limiting states’ ability to attack the outbreak.
Over the past few days, authorities in California, Ohio, West Virginia, Florida and Hawaii warned that their supplies were running out. New York City began canceling or postponing shots or stopped making new appointments because of the shortages.
The vaccine rollout so far has been “a major disappointment,” said Dr. Eric Topol, head of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.
Problems started with the Trump administration’s “fatal mistake” of not ordering enough vaccine, which was then snapped up by other countries, Topol said. Then, opening the line to senior citizens set people up for disappointment because there wasn’t enough vaccine, he said. The Trump administration also left crucial planning to the states and didn’t provide the necessary funding.
“It doesn’t happen by fairy dust,” Topol said. “You need to put funds into that.”
Last week, before Biden took over as president, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department suggested that the frustration was the result of unrealistic expectations among the states as to how much vaccine was on the way.
State health secretaries have asked the Biden administration for earlier and more reliable predictions on vaccine deliveries, said Washington state Health Secretary Dr. Umair Shah.
Dr. Marcus Plescia of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials was among those who said opening vaccinations to senior citizens was done too soon, before the supply could catch up.
“We needed steady federal leadership on this early in the launch,” Plescia said. “That did not happen, and now that we are not prioritizing groups, there is going to be some lag for supply to catch up with demand.”
Supply will pick up over the next few weeks, he said. Deliveries go out to the states every week, and the government and drugmakers have given assurances large quantities are in the pipeline.
The U.S. government has delivered nearly 38 million doses of vaccine to the states, and about 17.5 million of those have been administered, according to the CDC.
About 2.4 million people have received the necessary two doses, by the CDC’s count — well short of the hundreds of millions who will have to be inoculated to stop the outbreak.
Information for this article was contributed by Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times; by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Zeke Miller, Collin Binkley, Josh Boak, Carla K. Johnson, Brian Melley, Karen Matthews and Jennifer Peltz of The Associated Press; and by Michael Laris of The Washington Post.