◆ Biden criticizes Trump vaccine rollout.
WASHINGTON — President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday called President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic a “travesty” and 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 coronavirus vaccines. The law, enacted in 1950, gives the president the power to compel companies to produce and distribute supplies.
In the earliest weeks of the pandemic, Trump was criticized for not using the law to counter the country’s shortage of ventilators and personal protective equipment for front-line health workers. Trump later invoked the act to require General Motors to manufacture ventilators and to order meat processing plants to stay open.
Biden said Trump’s vaccine distribution efforts were falling far behind what had been promised and said he would “move heaven and earth” to bring an end to the coronavirus pandemic. But he also warned Americans that the worst of the coronavirus assault — “maybe the toughest of this entire pandemic” — remained ahead of them, despite early rounds of vaccinations underway.
With domestic air travel hitting record highs over the holiday weekend, Biden said he anticipated that infections now would produce increased cases in January and increased deaths in February.
“I can see a return to normalcy in the next year,” Biden said, but he warned that the country might not see improvements until well into March. “I know it’s hard to hear, but it’s the truth.”
He said the nation needed not only more vaccines and protective equipment but also a massive increase in testing to stem outbreaks that by now are occurring nationwide.
“After 10 months of the pandemic, we still don’t have enough testing,” he said. “It’s a travesty.”
As he has for months, Biden encouraged people to continue wearing masks, social distancing and practicing other measures to slow the spread of the virus. His remarks were his most extensive comments on the coronavirus since early this month, when he outlined a plan for his first 100 days in office that included imploring all Americans to wear masks.
“My ability to change the direction of this pandemic starts in three weeks,” Biden said.
Earlier Tuesday, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris became the latest high-profile politician to be vaccinated in a bid to build public trust in the process.
The setting for her shot was calculated: the United Medical Center in Washington, which serves the predominantly Black communities of the city’s southeast quadrant and the southern part of Prince George’s County, Md. Harris said she hoped she could allay the mistrust that many Black Americans are expressing about the vaccine by getting hers in a hospital that serves Black neighborhoods.
Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, said earlier that the nation was suffering a surge of cases “that has just gotten out of control in many respects.”
Fauci, appearing on CNN, lamented what he expects to be a post-holiday increase in cases and the strong possibility than January’s caseload will exceed even that of December.
“You just have to assume it’s going to get worse,” he said.
Fauci also acknowledged that the rollout of vaccines was not reaching as many Americans as quickly as the 20 million the Trump administration had pledged by the end of the month.
“We certainly are not at the numbers that we wanted to be at the end of December,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “We are below where we want to be.”