The Biden administration announced Tuesday that it is further increasing the weekly vaccine shipments that the federal government sends to states.
The White House COVID-19 response team announced that states will now receive 14.5 million doses starting next week, a jump of 13.5 million.
The team tweeted that the figure is “an increase of almost 70% since we took office just over a month ago.”
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White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki
The road to confirmation of Jen PsakiTanden seems increasingly unsustainable The Asian and American Pacific Caucus urges senators to confirm that Tanden Biden orders flags to half the staff to mark 500,000 virus deaths MORE said Tuesday the White House response coordinator COVID-19 Jeff Zients
Jeff Zients: The Hill’s Morning Report – Biden on COVID-19: Next Year Americans Will Be “Better” in Overnight Health Care: CDC Study Says Double Masking Works | House Democrats propose a multimillion-dollar relief package COVID-19 | Industry groups support ObamaCare reforms proposed by Democrats The Hill’s Morning Report – Presented by TikTok – Day 1 goes to Dems as GOP smokes Trump lawyers MORE he first made the announcement in a call with governors Tuesday morning.
This afternoon we announced that we will increase the weekly supply of vaccines to states to 14.5 million doses starting next week, above the 13.5 million we announced last week.
This is an increase of almost 70% since we took office just over a month ago.
– White House COVID-19 Response Team (@WHCOVIDResponse) February 23, 2021
The announcement comes a week after the White House announced it was increasing the number of distributed doses from 11 million to 13.5 million.
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The Biden administration is working to bolster its vaccination efforts in the face of a plethora of variants that appear to be more infectious than the original strain of coronavirus that spread around the world. COVID-19 cases are falling across the country, but the presence of variants threatens to make this fall only temporary.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 65 million people have been inoculated with at least one shot of the Modern or Pfizer vaccine, the only two approved so far by the Food and Drug Administration. Of these people, about 20 million have received both doses, or about 6% of the American population.
The expansion of the federal government’s vaccine distribution comes when Moderna and Pfizer said Tuesday they will be able to administer more than 130 million additional combined doses by the end of March. The two companies already have contracts to provide 600 million doses.