Biden announces the US will have enough vaccines for 'every adult in America' by the end of May

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Eliza Relman,Sonam Sheth
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Biden
President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting with labor leaders in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2021, in Washington Evan Vucci/AP

President Joe Biden announced on Tuesday that the US will have enough vaccine doses for "every adult in America" by the end of May. The news is a major development in the country's ongoing fight against the COVID-19 pandemic and speeds up the estimated timeline to reach this threshold by about one month.

Biden said during his White House address that the pharmaceutical giant Merck will work with Johnson & Johnson, a major competitor, to manufacture J&J's new vaccine and produce 100 million doses of it by the end of May. This comes after the US Food and Drug Administration authorized J&J's COVID-19 one-dose vaccine for emergency use over the weekend.

"Today, we're announcing a major step forward," Biden said Tuesday. "Two of the largest healthcare and pharmaceutical companies in the world that are usually competitors are working together on the vaccine."

He added: "Johnson & Johnson and Merck will work together to expand the production of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine. This is the type of collaboration between companies we saw in World War II. We also invoked the Defense Production Act to equip two Merck facilities to the standards necessary to safely manufacture the J&J vaccine."

"As a consequence of the stepped up process that I ordered, and just outlined, this country will have enough vaccine supply for every adult in America by the end of May," Biden said.

Biden touted his administration's effort to dramatically expand vaccine distribution and contrasted it with that of President Donald Trump, saying, "When we came into office, the prior administration had not contracted nearly enough vaccine for adults in America."

Biden said his administration has brought back retired healthcare workers, deployed more than 1,500 federal medical personnel, and set up rural and mobile vaccination centers to speed up distribution.

The president also recommended that states prioritize vaccine distribution to teachers and school staff and said he'd like to see every educator receive their first vaccine dose by the end of March. Biden added that he hopes "by this time next year, we're going to be back to normal." But he called on Americans to "continue to be smart" about following COVID-19 mitigation guidelines.

As of Monday, the US had administered almost 77 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The US is expecting 600 million doses of the Pfizer and and Moderna vaccines to be administered over the next four months.

While both the Pfizer and and Moderna vaccines require two shots several weeks apart, the J&J vaccine involves just a single shot, is cheaper to administer, and may perform better against coronavirus variants.

"It's nice to have a single-dose vaccine," Eric Rubin, an FDA committee member and the editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, said Friday after the agency voted to authorize the J&J vaccine for emergency use. "The demand is so large that it clearly has a place."

Read the original article on Business Insider

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