On Thursday, President Biden stressed the necessity of wearing masks to save lives until at least 2022, despite announcing that the US would have enough vaccine supplies to inoculate 300 million Americans by the summer.
During a visit to the National Institutes of Health complex, the president told reporters that he would not take off his mask even though he stood more than 10 feet away from Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH.
“Biden said, “You know that wearing this mask here for the next year will save lives, a large number of lives. “And so I’m sorry if you don’t hear me as clearly as you do, you might have to.”
Biden cautioned that with new highly-contagious variants spreading, the country is already “in the teeth of this pandemic.”
The deadliest month we’ve had was January 2021. Over 100,000… 100,000 of our fellow citizens have been lost. This coming month, we’re on track to cross 500,000 dead Americans,’ he said.
The evolving new strains present enormous obstacles, and the best thing to do to save lives is still to hide them. Yet both of us need to mask up.
However, with Biden’s first three weeks in office providing more than 26 million jabs, the US is on track to exceed its target of administering 100 million doses in its first 100 days.
We signed the final contracts just this afternoon for 100 million more Moderna and 100 million more Pfizer vaccines. And we can also shift the delivery dates up to the end of July with an additional 200 million vaccines, faster than we planned, the president said Thursday.
Biden also said that 37 states, territories and tribes have so far been given $3 billion by the government to improve existing vaccination centres and open more centres to administer the shots.
“We’re deploying federal vaccinators, and over the last three weeks, we put hundreds of new vaccinators in the field and are lining up thousands more.”
The “end goal” is “beating COVID-19,” the president said.
