Biden to seek reelection
President doubles goal to 200 million vaccines dispensed in 100 days
President also doubles his goal to 200 million vaccines dispensed in 100 days.
President Joe Biden on Thursday set a new goal of 200 million vaccine shots in his first 100 days in office because the nation is on track to meet that benchmark. Biden made the announcement at the start of his first formal news conference as president at the White House, where he said he plans to seek reelection in 2024 and answered questions on his handling of immigration, the filibuster, Afghanistan and North Korea.
Biden opened his news conference by announcing that he would double his goal of administering 100 million coronavirus vaccination shots to Americans by his 100th day in office.
“That’s right, 200 million shots in 100 days,” Biden said.
Biden called the goal “ambitious,” but the United States is already on pace to meet it.
The country has been averaging about 2.5 million doses a day in the past week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At that pace, the nation would hit Biden’s goal before April 30, his 100th day.
Biden noted that he set his original goal on Dec. 8, before taking office.
“We met that goal last week,” he said.
Biden previously hinted at setting the more ambitious goal of 200 million.
Earlier Thursday, the White House announced that it is committing nearly $10 billion to address inequities in vaccine coverage based on race, income and geography, a problem that has bedeviled health officials overseeing the coronavirus immunization effort.
At his news conference, the president offered a preview of the case he’ll make for his administration’s next major legislative initiative, a massive infrastructure package that he plans to detail at an event next week in Pittsburgh.
“The next major initiative ... is to rebuild the infrastructure, both physical and technological infrastructure of this country, so that we can compete and create significant numbers of really good paying jobs, really good paying jobs,” he said.
Biden said that Republicans used to put a priority on building roads, bridges and other forms of infrastructure and lamented that the United States now lags many countries, including China, in the investment it makes.
“I still think the majority of the American people don’t like the fact that we now rank ... 85th in the world in infrastructure,” he said. “I mean, look, the future rests on whether or not we have the best airports that can accommodate air travel, ports that you can get out of quickly . ... So there’s so much we can do.”
In regards to China’s human rights violations, Biden said his administration would “insist that China play by the international rules.”
He described Chinese President Xi Jinping as “a smart, smart guy” who “doesn’t have a democratic with a small D bone in his body.”
“He’s one of the guys like Putin who thinks that autocracy is the wave of the future,” Biden said.
In their first phone conversation as heads of state, Biden said he and Xi spoke for two hours and that he emphasized that the United States was not looking for confrontation, “although we know there will be steep, steep competition.”
Biden also said the United States would need investments in American workers and science to compete with China effectively.
“But (the U.S.) will insist that China play by the international rules, fair competition, fair practices, fair trade,” he said.
The president noted that he had recently met with the heads of the other “Quad countries” — Australia, India and Japan — to discuss how to hold China accountable in the region.
“We have to have democracies working together,” he said. “We’re going to make it clear that in order to deal with these things, we are going to hold China accountable, to follow the rules, whether it relates to the South China Sea, the North China Sea or the agreement made on Taiwan or a whole range of other things.”
Biden said he made clear to Xi that Americans value human rights and would continue to call out China’s human riots violations, specifically citing the persecution of the Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region and in the erosion of democracy in Hong Kong.
“The moment the president walks away from that (commitment to human rights), as the last one did, is the moment we began to lose our legitimacy around the world,” Biden said. “It’s who we are.”