Earlier this week President Joe Biden delivered his very first new conference since entering the White House. He talked about quite a broad range of different issues ranging from Trump to re-election plans and of course the pandemic!
President Biden during his conference promised to outspend China on innovation and infrastructure to prevent it from overtaking the US to become the world’s most powerful country. He, however, didn’t give clarity about his plans for the import tariffs currently in place on the majority of Chinese imports or to even go as far as to ban products which are / were made from forced labor.
He also went on to set a goal of administering 200 million Covid-19 vaccination doses by the end of April, which would mark his first 100 days in office. When inaugurated his original goal had been to achieve 100 million vaccinations but given the success of the roll out the country was able to achieve that target on his 58th day. A full 42 days earlier than planned and this has led President Biden to increase the target. He said, “I know it’s ambitious. I believe we can do it.” But is it really overly ambitious?
Looking at the USA’s current pace of vaccination they should even be able to beat this new revised target! Based on my estimations and using the current pace, the US will record approximately 203 million shots by the end of Biden’s 100th full day. On Friday alone the US administered 2,624,310 doses in one day – which makes their new revised goal all the more achievable.
However, over the next coming months we are expecting several different drug manufacturers to further increase their vaccine production. This should help increase the number of successful vaccinations even further!
The timing of this comes just as the number of new infections in the US began to increase. On Wednesday the seven day average of new cases increased to 57,695, which is a 9.5% increase over the previous week. This is the first time we have seen an increase in weekly average new cases since early January. Will be interesting to see where we trend from here.
President Biden, couldn’t help himself and made fun of former President Trump making comments about how he missed Trump. “My predecessor … Oh God, I miss him.” He then went on to question whether there would even be a Republican party at the next election! Only time will tell!
Interestingly enough photographers caught Biden relying on 14 point font prompt cards during his press conference and this even included one with head shots of the news reporters he planned to call on.
