President Joe Biden announced Thursday that the United States has purchased enough vaccines for all Americans, at least 300 million doses. During a tour of the National Institutes of Health, President Biden said the federal government has acquired an additional 200 million doses of the Moderna vaccine.
The U.S. is now on track to have enough supply of the vaccine to inoculate 300 million Americans by the end of July. That comes out to roughly 600 million doses, boosting “supply in the United States by 50 percent,” said the President.
[Photographer: Doug Mills/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images]“As the President directed, we are expanding our supply of COVID vaccines to protect people as quickly as possible,” acting Health and Human Services Secretary Norris Cochran said in a statement.
President Biden greets Kizzmekia Corbett, an immunologist with the Vaccine Research Center, at NIH on Thursday.
Corbett's team began first-stage clinical trials in March 2020 and helped develop coronavirus vaccines.
While it’s unlikely the additional purchase will make the vaccine widely available sooner than originally planned, it may prevent shortages later this year. More than 32 million Americans have received at least one dose of a vaccine, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Biden administration had also announced last week that the first federal mass vaccination sites will open in Oakland and Los Angeles later this month.
BREAKING: "We've now purchased enough vaccine supply to vaccinate all Americans," President Biden says after announcing the purchase of 200M more coronavirus vaccines (100M Moderna, 100M Pfizer).
President Biden is already well on pace to exceed his goal of 100 million vaccinations in his first 100 days in office. According to the Center For Disease Control, at least 26 million doses have been administered in Biden’s first three weeks in office.
The president’s team has also taken an increased role in determining where each vial of vaccine goes, with an eye on ensuring that lower-income, rural, and minority communities are covered, an implicit criticism of how some states have handled their rollouts.
