President Biden says he’s “quite confident” that in roughly three weeks the nation will “be vaccinating people at the range of a 1 million a day or in excess of that.”
The president, taking questions from reporters on Monday after an executive order signing, raised the bar on his pledge from the presidential campaign trail of achieving 100 million COVID-19 vaccinations in his first 100 days as president. Biden said he was hopeful “1.5 million a day, rather than 1 million a day” could be achieved in a couple of weeks.
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The president, speaking at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, noted that “we’ve gotten commitments from some of the producers that they will in fact produce more vaccine in a relatively short period time and then continue that down the road.”
President Joe Biden answers questions from reporters in the South Court Auditorium on the White House complex, Monday, Jan. 25, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Asked by reporters when anyone who wants a coronavirus vaccine will be able to receive one, Biden said “I think we’ll be able to do that this spring.” And looking forward, he added that “I feel confident by summer we’ll be well on our way towards heard immunity and increasing the access.”
Biden, who in the last couple of weeks called the slow vaccine rollout by President Trump’s administration a “dismal failure,” optimistically said “I feel good about where we’re going and I think we can get it done.”
The president’s responses on Monday stand in contrast to his pessimistic sounding comments on Friday when he indicated that the trajectory of the pandemic couldn’t be changed in the coming months, no matter what Americans do. “If we fail to act, there will be a wave of evictions and foreclosures in the coming months as this pandemic rages on, because there’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months,” the president said.
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Asked by Fox News’ White House correspondent Peter Doocy to square his comments from Friday and Monday, the president emphasized that “I am going to shut down the virus, but I never said I was going to do it in two months. I said it took a long time to get here. It’s going to take a long time to beat it. We have millions of people out there who have the virus.”
“It’s going to take time. It’s going to take a heck of a lot of time,” Biden stressed.
More than 420,000 people in the U.S. have died from coronavirus-related illnesses since the pandemic swept the nation nearly a year ago, with the number of cases now topping 25.2 million people in the country.
The president warned, “We’re going to see somewhere between a total of 600,000 to 660,000 deaths before we begin to turn the corner in a major way.”
While Biden said he’s “confident we will beat this,” he acknowledged that “we’re still going to be dealing with this issue in early fall.”
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