Biden Plans Mask Mandate, 100 Million Covid Vaccine Doses in First 100 Days

President-elect Joe Biden’s promise of administering 100 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine in 100 days is “absolutely a doable thing,” Anthony Fauci said.

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he expects Biden not to hesitate to “use whatever mechanisms we can” to speed the production and distribution of the shots, including invoking the Defense Production Act.

“The feasibility of his goal is absolutely clear, there’s no doubt about it,” Fauci said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

U.S. authorities gave emergency use authorizations in December for a vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech, and one from Moderna Inc.

Fauci said that the U.S. may be “weeks away, not months away” from approvals of additional vaccines being developed by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca Plc.

Addressing early slowdowns in giving Covid vaccines, Fauci said there didn’t need to be rigid adherence to initial guidelines on who should be eligible and in what order.

“You just want a steady flow. You don’t want to hold back,” he said. “You want to not, essentially, overshoot nor undershoot, but just let the flow keep going.”

Vaccinations against the coronavirus in the U.S. began Dec. 14 with health-care workers, and so far 13.7 million shots have been given, according to a state-by-state tally by Bloomberg News and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

An average of almost 850,000 doses per day were administered in the U.S. over the past week.

Biden’s timeline for deploying 100 million doses actually sets the bar low, according to two Trump administration officials familiar with the vaccine delivery drive, known as Operation Warp Speed.

Internal administration projections suggest that enough vaccine will be available by the end of April to provide shots to about 170 million people, the officials said.

Scott Gottlieb, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said 45 million doses have been shipped or will be available to states on Tuesday and another 5 million have been ordered by states.

Biden’s plan, “trying to push this through different channels like big-box stores, like pharmacies, trying to set up more federally chartered sites,” makes sense, he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

The president-elect warned Friday that “we didn’t get into all of this overnight. And we won’t get out of it overnight, either.” He’s expected to launch a “100 Day Masking Challenge” after taking office, imposing new mandates that require masks on federal property and for interstate transportation.

The incoming head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, said there are bottlenecks at different points of the vaccine system, but that supplies will be adequate.

“We have looked carefully and we are confident that we have enough vaccines for the 100 million doses over the next 100 days,” she said on CBS. “That’s what the president-elect has promised. It will be a hefty lift, but we have it in us to do that.”

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