President Biden Says U.S. Will Secure 600 Million COVID-19 Vaccine Doses by July
The United States will have enough COVID-19 vaccines for 300 million people by July, President Joe Biden said Thursday.
Biden announced during a trip to National Institutes of Health that the U.S. has secured contracts from both Moderna and Pfizer to deliver an additional 100 million doses each by the end of July.
A total of 600 million doses will have been delivered to the U.S. by mid-summer — more than a month earlier than initially anticipated, Biden said.
"We've now purchased enough vaccine supplies to vaccinate all Americans," Biden said, via USA Today. "Now we're working to get those vaccines into the arms of millions of people."
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Biden also noted that the timeline could further accelerate if a third COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson receives FDA approval.
The president said "it's been a hell of a learning process" to increase the vaccine supply and the country's capacity to deploy them, the Associated Press reported.
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He said he inherited "no plan to vaccinate most of the country" from his predecessor, former President Donald Trump.
"It is no secret that the vaccination program was in much worse shape than my team and I anticipated," he said, according to the AP.
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He added, "My predecessor, to be very blunt about it, did not do his job. We won't have everything fixed for a while. But we're going to fix it."
To date, the U.S. has administered more 46 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, with just more than 11 million people having received the second dose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Biden also said Thursday that the country is on track to exceed his administration's goal of administering 100 million vaccine doses within his first 100 days in office, the AP reports.
"That's just the floor," Biden said. "Our end goal is beating COVID-19."
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