President Joe Biden announces he’s moving up his deadline for states to make all adults in the U.S. eligible for coronavirus vaccines by two weeks to April 19. With cases rising, Biden also urged Americans to continue to wear masks and socially distance.
The president also said no one should fear mutations of the coronavirus that are showing up in the U.S. after being discovered in other countries. He acknowledged that the new strains are more virulent and more dangerous, but said “the vaccines work on all of them.”
Still, he acknowledged Tuesday that his administration fell short of its goal to deliver at least one shot to every teacher, school staff member and childcare worker during the month of March, to try to accelerate school reopenings. Biden announced the target early last month and directed federal resources toward achieving it, but said Tuesday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that about 80% of teachers, school staff and childcare workers had received a shot.
On Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, warned that the country is in a “critical time” because “we could just as easily swing up into a surge.” “We just don’t want to have to go back to really shutting things down. That would be terrible,” Fauci said. That allocation brings the total amount of vaccine distributed over the past three weeks to more than 90 million doses, Psaki said.