Itâs a strange moment in our nationâs historyâa contest between error and effort. After a year of mismanagement, America is racing to vaccinate the vulnerable; a new Administration is taking over just as a vastly more contagious form of the virus threatens to accelerate the surge. The pandemic is a juggernaut, bearing down upon us. Can Joe Biden and his team stop it?
The new Administration has proposed a wide-ranging, two-trillion-dollar plan to turn things around. The plan includes stimulus checks, expanded unemployment benefits, a minimum-wage increase, and funding to help schools open safely. But its most important component is vaccination. Biden has pledged to deliver a hundred and fifty million shots in his first hundred days in office; he has also announced that his Administration is nearing deals with Pfizer and Moderna to secure an additional two hundred million doses by the end of the summer. Together with the four hundred million doses the companies already plan to deliver, that would be enough to vaccinate every American adult. But distribution is still a problem. The pace has been accelerating; on several days last week, more than a million Americans were vaccinated. Even at that rate, however, it will take a year and a half to vaccinate eighty per cent of the U.S. population. The pace must accelerate further.