A member of President-elect Joe Biden’s COVID-19 advisory team told CNBC on Monday that Biden plans to invoke the Defense Production Act to boost coronavirus vaccine production.
Why it’s important: The law allows the president to direct the private sector to prioritize manufacturing in the interests of national defense.
The big picture: Biden will invoke the law of war to ensure that “personal protective equipment, testing capacity and raw materials for vaccines are produced with an adequate supply,” Biden councilor Dr Celine Gounder told CNBC’s Squawk Box
- Gounder added that under Biden’s administration, the U.S. will see “a significant increase” in testing for mild and asymptomatic cases of the virus, as well as in genomic surveillance, which tracks virus mutations to detect new variants.
- “We didn’t do it routinely,” Gounder said, referring to genomic surveillance under the Trump administration. “We have the technology. We just decided not to spend the money on this kind of public health surveillance.”
The state of play: The U.S. government has purchased 400 million doses of coronavirus vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna through Operation Warp Speed, including a 100 million dose deal reached with Pfizer last week amid revelations that some states would receive between 25% and 40% less vaccine doses than the original projected.
- The United States has also secured 400 million doses of Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Novavax, Sanofi / GlaxoSmithKline vaccines that have not yet been authorized by the FDA.
- Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar has said that all Americans who want a vaccine should be able to receive it in June 2021
In depth: Why will Americans demand to be able to prove they are vaccinated?