New York City data by ZIP code showed major income and racial disparities in the geography of the city’s vaccination efforts so far. South Africa will share its unused AstraZeneca doses after the vaccine showed weak results against a variant there.
President Biden said on Tuesday that every American who wants a Covid-19 vaccine will be able to get one by the end of July, with a more optimistic tone than last week when he warned that logistical and distributional barriers would most likely mean that many people would not have been vaccinated by the end of the summer.
Mr. Biden made a comment in Milwaukee at a town hall-style meeting hosted by CNN. When the host, Anderson Cooper, asked him when every American who wants a vaccine was going to be able to get a vaccine? "Mr. Biden replied without hesitation, "By the end of July of this year." He then tempered the remark slightly, telling Mr. Cooper that the doses would be "available" by that time. But he also said that he didn't expect it to take months to get shots in people's arms.
At a time when Americans are eager to get back to what life was like before the pandemic, Mr. Biden tried to offer reality-tempered reassurance.
While the president said he didn't want to "over-promise," he said at one point that "by next Christmas, I think we're going to be willing to God in a very different circumstance than we are today." At another point, he predicted that by the time the next school year starts in September, the nation would be "significantly better off than we are today."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued guidelines that urge school districts to reopen as soon as possible if they follow safety precautions.
Last week, the Biden administration said it had secured 200 million more doses of coronavirus vaccines, enough to inoculate every American adult. The additional doses amount to a 50 percent increase in the vaccine supply, and will give the administration the number of doses that necessary to cover 300 million people by the end of the summer.
But Mr. Biden warned at the time that it would still be difficult to get those shots into people’s arms. “It’s one thing to have the vaccine,” Mr. Biden said then. “It’s another thing to have vaccinators.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Biden used his pulpit to urge Americans to get vaccinated, addressing questions about the efficacy of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which has not yet been granted emergency authorization by the Food and Drug Administration. The vaccine has been shown to be slightly less effective against some of the more contagious variants of coronavirus than the two vaccines already in use, one by Moderna and the other by Pfizer BioNTech. Mr. Biden said that the Americans need to take it if it is offered.
“The clear notion is if you’re eligible, if it’s available, get the vaccine,” he said. “Get the vaccine.”
