The coronavirus pandemic is far from over, officials warned at the White House's first COVID-19 briefing after a six-week hiatus. Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House's new.
not take holidays off. you need to have the real thing as you gather with your relatives and christmas. we are glad you are here. maggie tells us she s mading up to the green bay christmas day game. i hope the weather is not 10 below. andrew writes this, my son alex who got his degree in broadcast journalism. congrats on the job. my one concern on this. if you are watching and working on a 5:00 a.m. local show, will you not be watching way too early. welcome to the business, get too alarms. up next, of the recent roadblock on build back better bill, the argument that president biden is still winning. come up, former senior on coronavirus respond, andy slavit
unclear. by the way, we still have a testing shortage for those who need it quickly. joining me now is andy slavit. i was talking to a former public health official for a fairly large state earlier today who is of the mind basically wondering what more can be done. what s realistic given our environment, our political divide, given the public s exhaustion. and i m curious before i get into some specifics about whether it s time to deal with this as an endemic, is there something we haven t tried that you think we should? well, a lot does rest on today s court case, because i think this is the most forceful and by the way, lawful steps to basically protect the american public. mark mcclelen and i co-authored a piece on this very topic in
ago so that s why we didn t manufacture enough feels like being shocked we re in the middle of a pandemic. you know, some things are going to be lost leaders. too many tests all the time ought to be lost leaders. why don t we have that mind set? well, look, back in september president biden put $3 billion into scaling more test production. we didn t have any at-home tests when the president came into office. we have two today. these things, i think, scale up. we probably would have had a problem over the christmas holidays anyway given the demand, but there s a couple things going on. one, way too many cases. there s no possible scenario where you can keep up with the cases. secondly, we got to make sure these things work. there are some questions about when they work and how well they work. the fda is smart to make sure they fully check these things out. andy, it s always good to have you on with your directness and your expertise.
fully exacted. nearly 130 million americans have completed their vaccine regime since the rollout in december. according to the data from the cdc nearly 5 million adolescents have received one dose since the fda gave the pfizer vaccine emergency use authorization. andy slavit had this to say this yesterday s briefing. today, the u.s. will hit 50% of adult americans that are fully vaccinated. this is a major milestone in our country s vaccination efforts. the number of was 1% when we entered office january 20th. across the country, 25 states in the district of columbia have fully vaccinated 50% or more of their adult population and nine states have recently crossed the threshold of 70% of adults with at least one shot. i really do want to applaud all of the good work and applaud all of the people in those states.