Washington: US President-elect Joe Biden has promised to distribute a coronavirus vaccine to 100 million people during the first three months of his incoming administration, pledging 100 million shots in the first 100 days.
At an event from Delaware to introduce his pandemic response team on Tuesday, Biden laid out his top three priorities for the start of his new government.
He repeated his previous calls for all Americans to wear masks for 100 days to prevent the spread of the virus and said he'd mandate doing so in federal buildings and on public transportation, while also making the new promise to distribute 100 million vaccines shots over the same period.
Biden also said he believed that the virus can be brought under enough control to reopen the majority of schools within his first 100 days.
Those pledges came even as Biden struck a sombre tone about the toll the coronavirus has already taken. He said that, after about nine months of living with the pandemic, the US is at risk of becoming numb to its toll on all of us".
"Today, I'm pleased to announce a team who's going to do just that. It's a team of world-class experts at the top of their fields, crisis tested, defined by a deep sense of duty, honor and patriotism," he said in a briefing from Wilmington, Delaware.
Biden nominated Indian-American doctor Vivek Murthy as Surgeon-General, Xavier Becerra as the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Dr Rochelle Walensky as the director for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr Anthony Fauci as chief medical adviser to the President, Jeff Zients as coordinator of the COVID-19 response, Natalie Quillian as deputy coordinator to the COVID-19 response, and Dr Marcella Nunez-Smith as the chair of his Covid-19 equity task force.
The president-elect specifically noted the virus's disproportionate effects on Americans of colour, calling it a mass casualty for many minority groups.
(AP)
Also read: Pfizer's Covid vaccine shows favourable safety profile: US FDA
