Facing looming shortages and rising infections, the president-elect promised mobile vaccination sites, National Guard troops and a federal push to increase vaccine production.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., racing against a surge in coronavirus cases and the emergence of a new variant that could worsen the crisis, is planning a vaccination offensive that calls for greatly expanding access to the vaccine while using a wartime law to increase production. In a speech on Friday in Wilmington, Del., Mr. Biden told Americans that “we remain in a very dark winter,” allowing, “the honest truth is this: Things will get worse before they get better.” “I told you,” he said, “I’ll always level with you.” But he also tried to offer hope for an end to a pandemic that has taken nearly 390,000 American lives and frayed the country’s economic and social fabric. “Our plan is as clear as it is bold: get more people vaccinated for free, create more places for them to get vaccinated, mobilize more medical teams to get the shots in people’s arms, increase supply and get it out the door as soon as possible,” he said, calling it “one of the most challenging operation efforts ever undertaken by our country.” He pledged to ramp up vaccination availability in pharmacies, build mobile clinics to get vaccines to underserved rural and urban communities and encourage states to expand vaccine eligibility to people 65 and older. Mr. Biden also vowed to make racial equity a priority in fighting a virus that has disproportionately infected and killed people of color. “You have my word,” he declared, “we will manage the hell out of this operation.” But the president-elect’s expansive vision is colliding with a sobering reality: With only two federally authorized vaccines, supplies will be scarce for the next several months, frustrating some state and local health officials who had hoped that the release of a federal stockpile of vaccine doses announced this week could alleviate that shortage. Mr. Biden is clearly prepared to assert a role for the federal government that President Trump refused to embrace, using the crisis to rebuild the nation’s public health services and Washington’s money to hire a new health work force and deploy the National Guard. But many of his bold promises will be difficult to realize. Even if Mr. Biden invokes the Korean War-era Defense Production Act, it may take some time to alleviate vaccine shortages. The law has been invoked already, to important but limited effect. His promises to build federally supported mass vaccination sites and develop new programs to serve high-risk people, including the developmentally disabled and those in jail, will work only if there are vaccines to administer. “It won’t mean that everyone in this group will get vaccinated immediately, as the supply is not where it needs to be,” Mr. Biden conceded. But as new doses become available, he promised, “we’ll reach more people who need them.” The vaccine distribution plan comes one day after Mr. Biden proposed a $1.9 trillion rescue package to combat the economic downturn and the Covid-19 crisis, including a $20 billion “national vaccine program.
