Biden Chief of Staff Commits to ‘100 Million Doses in 100 Days’

White House chief of staff Ron Klain told the press the Biden administration’s plans for mass vaccination programs throughout the country to ensure 100 million vaccinations in 100 days are “bold” but “not our final goal.”

“One-hundred million shots is a bold, ambitious goal, but we need to keep going after that. That is our first goal, it’s not our final goal, it’s not the endpoint, it’s just a metric the American people can watch and measure how we are doing,” Klain told NBC News.

The country is currently at pace to distribute a million vaccines a day, with 20.5 million doses administered throughout the country. But there is still a substantial lag between doses available and doses given, with nearly 20 million more vaccines waiting to be distributed.

Klain criticized the Trump administration for not utilizing the vast powers of the federal government to set up a nation-wide vaccine distribution plan.

“We are going to set up these federal vaccination centers to make sure that in states that don’t have enough vaccination sites, we fill those gaps. We’re going to work closely with the manufacturers to ramp up production,” he said, referencing President Biden’s signing of the Defense Production Act to push companies to wartime level of supply production.

“We’re going to use all the powers we have in the White House,” Klain added. “We are going to work with Congress to get more funding to also accelerate this, so we can improve the rate at which we are vaccinating people.”

Klain, a veteran of the Obama administration, was praised for his swift reaction to Ebola.

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smarcus@hamodia.com