BIDEN ASSAILS PRESIDENT’S EFFORTS TO FIGHT PANDEMIC
Vows extensive federal action to blunt virus spread
President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday cast President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic as meager and insufficient, as he vowed to fully use the federal government’s powers once inaugurated to speed the production and dispersal of vaccines and protective equipment.
Biden said he would invoke the Defense Production Act to ramp up production of materials needed for the coronavirus vaccines. The law, enacted in 1950, gives the president the power to compel companies to produce and distribute supplies. Trump has invoked the act several times to increase the manufacturing of ventilators, among other items.
Biden said that the Trump administration has yet to fully scale up testing — “that’s a travesty,” he said — and that its vaccine distribution efforts were also lagging behind what had been promised.
Although federal officials initially promised to vaccinate 20 million people by the end of this year, only 11.5 million doses have been distributed by the federal government and only 20 percent of those have been administered, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If the current rate continues, Biden said, it will “take years, not months, to vaccinate the American people.”
“The Trump administration’s plan to distribute vaccines is falling behind, far behind,” Biden said in a brief speech in Wilmington, Del., on Tuesday afternoon. “As I long feared and warned, the effort to distribute and administer the vaccine is not progressing as it should.”
Biden’s incoming national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told NPR on Tuesday that some of Trump’s political appointees have not shared vital information about the progress of the vaccine distribution with the transition team.
Trump responded to Biden on Twitter on Tuesday evening by shifting blame to state officials, who he said are responsible for distribution.
“It is up to the States to distribute the vaccines once brought to the designated areas by the Federal Government,” he wrote. “We have not only developed the vaccines, including putting up money to move the process along quickly, but gotten them to the states.”
Biden has vowed a far more robust and unified federal response that would utilize the heft of the U.S. government to prevent state competition.
The president-elect said he would find ways to speed up the production of vaccines and their distribution so that 1 million people can be vaccinated each day, which he said would be five to six times the current rate.
The president-elect made clear that the deadly fallout of Trump’s missteps will continue for several weeks, if not months, into his administration, as those who are exposed to the virus this month will appear in new cases and deaths weeks from now.
Biden said he expects “soaring case counts in January and soaring death tolls in February” and that there will likely be little improvement until “well into March.”
The nation’s overall caseload surpassed 19 million on Sunday. Hospitalizations have exceeded 100,000 since the start of December and hit a peak of 119,000 on Dec. 23. Deaths are averaging more than 2,000 a day, with the most reported to date — 3,406 — on Dec. 17.