The Biden team said it had identified 12 “immediate supply shortfalls” that were critical to the pandemic response, including N95 surgical masks and isolation gowns, as well as swabs, reagents and pipettes used in testing - deficiencies that have dogged the nation for nearly a year. “Comments made about vaccine supply and distribution by the White House’s coronavirus czar are old Washington spin,” Mr. Biden’s promise of “100 million shots” insufficient. On Capitol Hill, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. Trump, saying, “For the past year, we couldn’t rely on the federal government to act with the urgency and focus and coordination that we needed, and we have seen the tragic cost of that failure.” “The brutal truth is it’s going to take months before we can get the majority of Americans vaccinated,” he said.Ĭalls for unity were already fraying a day into the new presidency. The Trump administration had looked at all available manufacturing capacity domestically and globally, but there was little space left to secure more production. The Trump administration had already invoked the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era law, to force suppliers to prioritize orders from Pfizer, Moderna and other vaccine makers whose products are still in development. Coronavirus Origins: Two new studies exploring how the Covid outbreak began, concluded that the wet market in Wuhan, China, was the likely epicenter of its emergence. But fears for their children fueled by vaccine skepticism have turned them into single-issue voters, on the side of no vaccine mandates for their children. Parents and Pandemic Politics: They were once Democrats and Republicans.Rural America: New research found that Covid killed Black and Hispanic people across small towns and farmlands at considerably higher rates last year than it did their white neighbors.Boosters: The Biden administration is expected to begin a Covid-19 booster campaign in September, offering updated vaccines that should prove more effective against the now-dominant Omicron subvariant BA.5.The plan instructed federal agencies to invoke the Defense Production Act if necessary to expand supplies created a “pandemic testing board” to help expand access to testing ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to issue guidelines to protect workers called for new guidelines on reopening schools and businesses and said the government would begin fully reimbursing states for the cost of using the National Guard to accelerate the pace of vaccinations. The “National Strategy for the Covid-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness” outlined the kind of centralized response that Mr. “History is going to measure whether we are up to the task,” he said in the White House’s State Dining Room, with Vice President Kamala Harris and Dr. How he handles it will set the tone for how his administration is viewed, Mr. The nation, he said, is “still in a very serious situation.”Īs thousands of Americans die every day from Covid-19 and the threat of viral mutations looms, the pandemic poses the most pressing challenge of Mr. Biden issued on Wednesday requiring mask-wearing in all federal facilities, edges the country toward the kind of comprehensive mask mandate that has dominated debate at the state and local level between public health advocates and those defending what they called individual liberty.Īnd while the current vaccines still work against the new variants, the immune response they induce might be slightly diminished, he said, adding even more urgency to quickly vaccinating people. The mask requirement for public transportation, coupled with the order Mr. Biden predicted that the national death toll from Covid-19 would top 500,000 next month, refusing to play down the carnage that his predecessor was loath to acknowledge. The orders included new requirements for masks on interstate planes, trains and buses, the creation of a national testing board and mandatory quarantines for international travelers arriving in the United States. WASHINGTON - President Biden, seeking to assert leadership over the coronavirus pandemic, signed a string of executive orders and presidential directives on Thursday aimed at creating the kind of centralized authority that the Trump administration had shied away from.
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