Biden Touts 100 Million Vaccine Shots in 58 Days

By Yuval Rosenberg

Biden Touts 100 Million Vaccine Shots in 58 Days

President Joe Biden said today that the country will hit
his target of 100 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine in 100 days on
Friday — 42 days ahead of schedule.

“When I announced in early December a goal that I set of
administering 100 million shots for the virus in the first 100 days
of our office, it was considered ambitious, some even suggested was
somewhat audacious,” Biden said at the White House Thursday
afternoon. “I’m proud to announce that tomorrow, 58 days into our
administration, we will have met my goal of administering 100
million shots to our fellow Americans.”

Biden made the pledge to provide the 100 million vaccines
in 100 days during the presidential transition, shortly before the
treatments were approved for emergency use.

Average daily vaccinations have risen to about 2.5 million
per day, up from nearly 1 million a day when Biden took office — a
level that led to criticism that Biden had set the bar too low,
with experts arguing by the time Biden was inaugurated that the
rate of vaccinations would need to climb much higher. Soon after
taking office, Biden increased the target to 150 million doses in
100 days. (See the CDC chart below showing the daily vaccination
trend.)

In total, nearly 116 million Covid-19 vaccine doses have
been administered since they first became available in December,
according to
CNN. The government has orders in for about 800
million doses of the three vaccines approved for emergency use.
About 29% of adults have received at least one dose so far, with
coverage rising to about 65% for those 65 and older.

Use of the Defense Production Act played a key role in
speeding up vaccine production, Biden said, resulting in a system
that will generate enough vaccine doses for every adult American by
the end of May.

Biden’s HHS Secretary Squeaks Through the Senate

The Senate on Thursday voted 50-49 to confirm Xavier Becerra as
head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Becerra, who
served in the House from 1993 to 2017 and then went on to become
California’s attorney general, will be the first Latino secretary
of HHS. The department — the largest in terms of spending — will
play a critical role in the Biden administration’s fight against
the coronavirus pandemic and its efforts to reverse some Trump-era
policies, expand access to health care and lower costs.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine was the only Republican to back
Becerra’s confirmation (and Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Democrat,
did not vote).

Other Republicans criticized Becerra as a partisan with no
public health experience. They also opposed his record of support
for abortion rights.

Democrats praised Becerra’s experience and blasted the GOP
attacks. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Republicans were
challenging Becerra’s qualifications and citing his lack of medical
experience even though they had supported President Trump’s
nomination of Alex Azar, a pharmaceutical executive who also was an
attorney and not a medical professional.

Becerra, 63, had long advocated for a single-payer health
system, but as California’s attorney general he was also a key
defender of the Affordable Care Act, leading legal efforts to
preserve the Obama health care law. After being nominated by Biden,
who has rejected a single-payer system, Becerra said he supports
the president’s view that insurance coverage should be expanded by
building on Obamacare and creating a Medicare-like public insurance
option.

Becerra is expected to be sworn in as HHS secretary on
Friday.

Quote of the Day

“It may be an overstated political cliché that if you’re
explaining, you’re losing. But you’re almost certainly losing if
you’re explaining, ahead of time, why the economic boom you’re
expecting on your opponent’s watch shouldn’t be attributed to your
opponent.”

– Politico Magazine’s Michael Grunwald, in a
new piece detailing the challenges Republicans may
face in running against an economic recovery and the differences
between this year and 2009.

Number of the Day: 47%

Nearly half of all workers in California have claimed
unemployment benefits since the start of the Covid epidemic,
according to new research highlighted by
The New York Times Thursday. The California Policy
Lab found that nearly 47% of the pre-pandemic workforce in the
state had filed for assistance through state and federal jobless
programs at some point in the last year, with some groups being far
more likely to need help than others. “Nearly 90 percent of Black
workers have claimed benefits, compared with about 40 percent of
whites,” the Times’ Ben Casselman wrote. “Younger and less-educated
workers have been hit especially hard.”

The data suggest that the jobs crisis is far from over in
California, which leads the nation in the number of unemployed.
While millions of people have returned to work, nearly 4 million
have received more than 26 weeks of benefits, the usual definition
of long-term unemployed.

“We have solidly shifted into a world where a large-scale
problem of long-term unemployment is now a reality,” one of the
paper’s authors, economist Till von Wachter of UCLA, told
Casselman.

John Chambers, former chairman of the sovereign rating committee
at Standard & Poor’s, is one of the analysts who stripped the
United States of its AAA credit rating in 2011, reducing it one
notch to AA+ amid a tense battle in Washington over the debt
ceiling. Bloomberg’s Brian Chappatta spoke with Chambers this week
about that event and his view of the current fiscal situation. Some
highlights (full
interview here):

Why the US was downgraded in 2011: “You had a clear —
although perhaps remote — possibility that the U.S. government
would default on its debt, triggered by the debt ceiling. ... The
fiscal position was a contributing factor, but the main factor was
the political setting and the congressional brinksmanship.”

The value of the social contract: “The American Rescue
Plan Act will weaken the country’s position [with respect to
creditworthiness], just the same way as the large corporate tax
cuts of 2017 did. It will also probably do nothing to improve its
trend growth rate because it’s not addressing public investment.
But it may, however, strengthen the social contract. My view is
this act is a political measure, and in the end it’s going to have
to be evaluated in political terms. The social contract has
weakened a great deal during my lifetime, and if the act comes to
be seen as strengthening the social contract, it might be worth the
cost.”

Fiscal situation not improving: “Neither the Republican
nor the Democratic parties have shown any ability to carry out
countercyclical fiscal policy in good times. It’s one thing to have
countercyclical fiscal policy in bad times, but you have to have
some contraction when times are good. And we haven’t seen that. We
didn’t see that in the four years running up to the election, and
we’re not seeing it now.”

What could come next: “Eventually,
there will have to be a fiscal correction. ... Now, what’s likely
to happen is there will be measures of financial repression and
policy makers will slowly try to inflate the debt away. That would
be one endgame, and that worked fairly well in the 50s and 60s, so
maybe it’ll work again. ... I think eventually taxes will have to
rise, they’ll have to rise not only to adjust for what we’ve been
doing the last few years but they’ll have to rise for increased
health expenditures. Those will have to be fairly broad-based
because you simply can’t get sufficient funds for what we’re
talking about out of the superrich. And that can be done. But it
takes a national consensus, it takes bipartisanship and it takes
people taking a long-term view.”

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