“Virtually anyone and everyone in any category can start vaccinating,” Fauci said optimistically.
On key questions – such as when every American who wants a vaccine can get one, when all students can return to classrooms and when life can get a semblance of normality – Biden either disputed a partial projection or offered only, and admit does not want to commit too much and later get the blame. This comes in stark contrast to its predecessor, which practically began to predict the end of the crisis as soon as it began.
His approach seems to be strengthened only this week after disappointing – and for some officials, surprising – news from Johnson & Johnson. Fauci tempered his “open season” expectations after private talks between federal health officials and employees at the drug manufacturer, which revealed that he was expected to have fewer doses of the vaccine available if approved by the Food and Drug Administration .
“It was based on J&J – the Johnson product – which had significantly more doses than we know now,” Fauci said this week as he explained his initial April target. He now believes that the restrictions on who is eligible for a vaccine will fall in “mid to late May and early June.”
A person familiar with the process, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions, told CNN that the more conspicuous public comments were a reflection of private, optimistic talks between the government and Johnson & Johnson . As the company has been more hopeful in recent weeks about what to expect in April, so have officials – and their public statements reflect that.
But expectations for a large increase in doses were dashed when Johnson & Johnson tempered the projections. The company is still struggling with increased production at its Baltimore plant, and the government now believes there are initially less than 7 million doses of its vaccine available if it is approved in the coming weeks.
Johnson & Johnson has a contractual obligation to provide the federal government with 100 million doses by the end of June.
“We are doing everything we can to work with the company to speed up their delivery schedule,” said Coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients.
Instructive lesson
The episode with Johnson and Johnson was instructive for some within the White House, who are eager to give the public good news about the vaccine supply and a trend toward normalcy, but have become wary of making promises they can not keep.
Biden will visit a Pfizer plant in Michigan on Friday in hopes of highlighting the government’s efforts to get doses quickly into the arms of Americans. The US has bought 300 million doses of the company’s vaccine and plans to deliver it sooner than initially expected. But even with huge commitments and accelerated timelines, Biden is still wary of naming a fixed date on which every American who wants a chance can get one.
What concrete goals Biden set, including the vaccination of 1 million Americans a day, was extraordinarily cautious, as the US almost reached that goal when Biden took office.
And others – such as his vow to have enough vaccines available to nearly every American by the end of July – have serious reservations. He said even by that date, many Americans would still have to wait as there was a shortage of personnel and aids to administer the shots.
At least at schools, Biden blamed the communication errors for the confusing timeline, though it is still unclear when the government believes all students – including those in high school – could possibly return to the classrooms.
But elsewhere, Biden and his team find that even following science and listening to experts – both of which they have put at the center of his campaign – do not provide clean or direct answers to the questions Americans have been desperate for for nearly a year in the pandemic.
Realistic goals
Biden’s assistants say he is realistic in the midst of an unpredictable and unprecedented health crisis, and does not want to arouse Americans’ hope if they can easily get in the way again by making snafus, variants or other unseen hiccups around the country. to make normal again.
He also took to heart the experience of the previous government, which offers different deadlines for the reopening and ‘flattening of the curve’ that has come and gone, often without a scientific basis.
At the onset of the crisis, Trump offered the rosy name “15 days to delay the spread” in the hope that the outbreak would last only a few weeks. When it became clear that this was not happening, Trump extended the guidelines to 30 days, but he still offered timelines with little to back it up.
He told Americans he wanted the country to ‘open up and just risk Easter’ – a timeline that health experts are privately questioning. When the date came and went, officials – including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner – set their sights on summer.
“I think by June you will see that a large part of the country needs to be normal again, and the hope is that by July the country will really falter again,” Kushner said last spring.
It also seems to be wrong when things start to increase and states maintain their lockouts.
In October, when his re-election campaign was sputtering, Trump said the country was ‘walking the curve’, even as things started to shoot up. Biden uses the predictions of science to claim that its rival is not straight with the American people.
“Be careful to predict things you do not know for sure what is going to happen, because then you will be held accountable,” Biden said on Tuesday during CNN’s town hall, describing the advice he said he received from health experts. like Fauci.
He made the remark when answering a question about when the country would become normal, which he addressed for Christmas – almost a year away. It is beyond an autumn target once offered by Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, although even Fauci admitted on Wednesday that the prediction of “normalcy” was an issue.
“It’s perfectly reasonable to say that. We do not know,” he said of Biden’s Christmas projection during an interview on CNN. “The president made an estimate, which I think is a reasonable estimate.”
However, the White House said a day after Biden’s town hall that even Biden’s prediction of the Christmas season should not be seen as an absolute commitment.
“We are not in a place where we can predict exactly when everyone will feel normal again,” said Jen Psaki, press secretary.
Widest projections
In some cases, the warning from Biden and his team with the presentation of anything but the broadest projections on how and when his efforts to curb the pandemic are causing confusion.
The White House’s position on reopening schools became confused when Psaki, when explaining Biden’s promise, said it could only mean 50% of schools one day a week.
She later said it was “not the ceiling” of the government’s endeavor, and Biden said on Tuesday that the White House’s confusing position amounted to a communication error. ‘
But the White House is still caught between the desire to reopen to allow parents to return to work and unions for teachers who are campaigning for members who are wary of returning to classrooms without strict protection against the virus.
Even Biden’s efforts to clarify did not offer a date on which he believed that every American student could return to personal learning. He said it was his goal to have grades K-8 within the first 100 days as president five days a week in classrooms, but could not provide a similar goal for high school students.
And in interviews later, the government could not explicitly say whether teachers’ vaccination should be a prerequisite for the reopening of schools, which according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was not the case in its guidelines.
“These are really difficult things to which there are no clear answers,” said Jim Messina, who was a deputy chief of staff to President Barack Obama before running his re-election campaign. “And you saw a president who is going to stay with the country very honestly, even if some people do not want to hear it.”