President Joe Biden said pharmaceutical companies agreed to sell more vaccine doses to the US faster than planned after he invoked federal law that could force their production.
The government said last week that 300 million doses each of Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccines would arrive in the US by the end of July, enough to inoculate all adult residents.
“We got them to move up time because we used the National Defence Act to be able to help the manufacturing piece of it, to get more equipment,” Mr Biden said at a CNN question and answer session in Milwaukee on Tuesday night.
He appeared to be referring to the Defence Production Act, a law that allows the government to nationalise commercial production in emergencies.
The “town hall” event, broadcast in prime-time, was an opportunity for Mr Biden to encourage Americans to seek vaccination and press for passage of his $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan. He said that people should take a shot when it’s available and as soon as they are eligible, regardless of the manufacturer, and predicted the country would be better off in September, the start of the new school year, than today.
“We should be vaccinating teachers, we should move them up in the hierarchy,” he told a teacher who asked him why it was safe for schools to reopen when private gatherings are still limited.
“It’s highly unlikely that by the beginning of next year school, traditional school year in September, we are not significantly better off than we are today,” Mr Biden said. “But it matters – it matters whether you continue to wear that mask, it matters whether you continue to socially distance, it matters whether you wash your hands with hot water. Those things matter.”
He said his administration mischaracterised its own target by publicly promoting a goal of reopening most classrooms for at least one day a week, a benchmark much of the nation has already reached. “That was a mistake in the communication,” he said.
Instead, he said he hopes “a majority” of primary schools would reopen by the summer.
He told a black woman identified as a health-care worker that closing racial disparities in vaccination is also a priority and that he understood reticence to be inoculated in minority communities because “there is some history of blacks being used as guinea pigs”.
The president reassured a little girl that she was unlikely to become ill from the virus herself. “You’re the safest group of people in the whole world,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry about it, baby. I promise you.”
The White House announced earlier Tuesday that vaccine shipments to states would rise next week to 13.5 million, from 11 million, while shipments going to pharmacies would double to two million next week.
But White House officials warned governors during a call on Tuesday that inclement weather could slow deliveries in the next few days.
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Gallery: Coronavirus in the US
