President Biden’s goal for the country to administer 100 million coronavirus shots in 100 days is a “floor, not a ceiling,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Sunday.
The 100 million COVID-19 vaccine shots would result in about 67 million vaccinated people by April — because there would be some people who will have gotten two doses and some that are still on their first dose, the president’s chief medical advisor explained on CBS Sunday morning. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two doses.
“It’s going to be a floor, not a ceiling,” Fauci said of the 100 million shots on “Face The Nation.”
“There is this misconception out there … because we’ve hit 1 million a day for a couple of days, that when we get out into the community it’s going to be really easy to do that. That’s not the case,” he added. “It is going to be a challenge. I think it was a reasonable goal that was set. We always want to do better than the goal we set, but it is really a floor and not a ceiling.”
Fauci stressed that the most important thing is for the country to “vaccinate as many people as we possibly can, as quickly as we possibly can.”
As of Sunday, more than 21.8 million total doses had been administered in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s broken down to 18.5 million Americans receiving at least one dose, and 3.2 million people receiving both doses.
As for the Biden administration’s goal of 100 million shots in 100 days, White House chief of staff Ron Klain on Sunday called it a “bold and ambitious goal,” but emphasized that it’s just a start.
“We need to keep going after that,” Klain said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“That is our first goal. It’s not our final goal. It’s not the endpoint,” he added. “It’s just a metric that the American people can watch and measure how we are doing.”
About half of the distributed doses across the country have been administered, he noted.
“The process of getting that vaccine into arms, that’s the hard process,” Klain said. “That’s where we’re behind in the country. And that’s where we’re focused in the Biden administration on getting that ramped up.”
He later added, “We need more vaccine. We need more vaccinators. We need more vaccination sites. And in the Biden administration, we’re tackling all three.”
___
(c) 2021 the Boston Herald
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
