Biden: US has bought enoughj vaccine to give 300m shots by end of July

BREAKING NEWS: Joe Biden says U.S. has bought enough vaccine to give 300 million people doses by the end of July – and slams Trump’s handling of buying and distributing shots

  • President Joe Biden announced Thursday that the U.S. will have enough supply of the vaccine by the end of the summer to inoculate 300 million Americans 
  • ‘We’ve now purchased enough vaccine to vaccinate all Americans,’ Biden said during a visit to the National Institutes of Health
  • During the visit, Biden blasted preparations made by former President Donald Trump, explaining the previous administration hadn’t bought enough vaccine

President Joe Biden announced Thursday that the U.S. will have enough supply of the vaccine by the end of the summer to inoculate 300 million Americans. 

‘We’ve now purchased enough vaccine to vaccinate all Americans,’ Biden said. 

He said the U.S. had secured contractual commitments from Moderna and Pfizer to deliver the 600 million doses of vaccine by the end of July – more than a month earlier than initially anticipated.  

Biden, used his remarks to criticize President Donald Trump, saying he inherited ‘no plan to vaccinate most of the country.’

‘It is no secret that the vaccination program was in much worse shape than my team and I anticipated,’ he said.

‘We … were led to believe there was a lot more vaccines than there was,’ Biden said. 

The U.S. is on pace to exceed Biden’s goal of administering 100 million vaccine doses in his first 100 days in office, with more than 26 million shots delivered in his first three weeks.  

Purchase: President Joe Biden (left), during a visit to the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health, said that the U.S. has now secured enough vaccine to offer everyone in the country inoculation by July. He was accompanied by Dr. Anthony Fauci (right) 

‘We’re not going to have everything fixed for a while, but we’re going to fix it,’ Biden said in remarks at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He was accompanied by  (from R) Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, Dr. Francis Collins, White House COVID Coordinator Jeffrey Zients, White House Chief Medical Adviser on Covid-19 Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Barney S. Graham

 Biden spoke to reporters during a visit to the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health on Thursday 

Earlier, Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated Americans who want the vaccine would be able to obtain it in April. 

‘By the time we get to April, that will be what I would call, for better wording, “open season,” namely, virtually everybody and anybody in any category could start to get vaccinated,’ Fauci said during a Thursday Today show interview. 

The pace of injections could increase further if a third coronavirus vaccine from drugmaker Johnson & Johnson receives approval from the Food and Drug Administration. 

With demand for the vaccine far outstripping supply, Americans are struggling to get appointments for their inoculations, leaving Biden with an acute problem less than a month after taking over from Trump.

‘We’re not going to have everything fixed for a while, but we’re going to fix it,’ Biden said in remarks at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. 

Biden said Trump, who spent his last two months in office in a futile effort to overturn the results of the Nov. 3 presidential election that he lost, did not order enough vaccine and did not do enough to get people lined up to get vaccinated.

‘While scientists did their job in discovering vaccines in record time, my predecessor – I’ll be very blunt about it – did not do his job in getting ready for the massive challenge of vaccinating hundreds of millions,’ Biden said.

He said the vaccine program he inherited was in ‘much worse shape’ than he had anticipated. ‘It’s going to take time to fix,’ he said. 

Speaking with Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease specialist, Biden emphasized that his administration is doing everything possible to increase the vaccine supply and the country’s capacity to deliver injections into arms.

‘It’s been a hell of a learning process,’ Biden said.

Biden toured the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory at the sprawling National Institutes of Health complex just outside Washington that created the COVID-19 vaccine now manufactured by Moderna and being rolled out in the U.S. and other countries. 

The Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory is led by Dr. Barney Graham, whose team made critical discoveries years ago that laid the groundwork for rapid development of that and other COVID-19 vaccines. 

Before the pandemic erupted, one of Graham’s research fellows, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, had been using those earlier findings to develop a vaccine for MERS, a cousin of COVID-19.

On the tour, Biden was shown the lab bench where researchers sequenced the virus and developed the precursor of the Moderna vaccine.

Armed with their prior research, Corbett and Graham had a head start when Chinese scientists shared the genetic map of the new coronavirus in January 2020. 

They already knew how to make spike proteins, which coat the surface of the new coronavirus and its MERS relative, that were stable enough to be used as a key vaccine ingredient.

Within days, the NIH had sent instructions to Moderna to brew up doses, and Corbett and her colleagues were setting up the key lab and animal tests that would eventually prove they were on the right track. 

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